Humour in music, does it work?

Earlier today, I answered a question about a possible link between four composers, including Mozart and Dohnanyi. I hazarded a guess that it might be the use of the nursery rhyme known in English as 'Twinkle twinkle, little star. Mozart wrote a set of piano variations on 'Ah vous-dirai je maman' which is that tune (less, one note, I believe). Dohnanyi used it as the basis for his 'Variations on a Nursery Theme'. Which brings me to the meat of this question. The Hungarian composer plays a joke with his listeners by having a very serious sounding introduction which lasts quite a while before eventually introducing his theme, the aforementioned nursery rhyme, the tune of which he uses for a witty set of variations. Hearing the work for the first time, the theme comes as a surprise after the build up of the introduction - on second and subsequent hearings the joke, if that is what was intended, falls totally flat as the hearer knows the punch line (as it were) ('Stop me if you've heard this one' - well, yes we have, Ernst). So the question is this, Can a composer be genuinely funny in 'absolute' music (using that term so as to exclude comic opera where other factors come into play), so that we laugh or smile on every hearing, or is it always going to be the case, as in the Variations, that once heard the joke falls flat?