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Max Raabe (center), dressed in 1920s period garb, will sing with the Palast Orchester in Royce Ha

With his starlit gaze and sweet, smooth voice, Max Raabe is a modern-day Rudy Vallee. On stage, the tall and slender baritone’s seductiveness is further accentuated by the elegant 1920s style tuxedo he wears. But the baritone also has a surprisingly offbeat sense of humor.

“Once I sat on a chair and left to go to the mike during a concert but my tuxedo coattail was caught in the chair, and the chair followed me like a dog. That sometimes happens,” Raabe said.

Similarly, the group Raabe fronts, Berlin’s 12-piece Palast Orchester, which performs Hollywood’s Golden Age music from the ’20s and ’30s, likes to portray the elegance of the era by performing in period costumes. But they also like to emphasize what Raabe says is the humorous side of the roaring-’20s music they perform.

“It’s a funny music,” Raabe said. “And of course, we have some elegant and sentimental songs in between, but there’s always irony. It’s a mix of irony, sentimentality and kitsch.”

In 1992, Raabe wrote a witty song called “Kein Schwein Ruft Mich An,” or “No Pig Ever Calls Me,” which brought the group stardom in Europe. In the song, Raabe moans to a tango rhythm about no one wanting to call him or showing interest in him. The song, however, proved otherwise, as it garnered Raabe and his group massive popularity, even becoming a ring tone for one mobile phone company.

After releasing a total of 20 albums in which they have performed the work of composers like Austrian-American Walter Jurmann and German Kurt Weill, the orchestra’s popularity in Europe continues to grow with each year, but it is as much for the group’s elegance as it is for the group’s kooky sense of humor.

The group has even received compliments from Simon Rattle, conductor of the renowned Berlin Philharmonic. And last year, the group sold out 18 weeks of its revue show in Germany. They have also performed in front of 50,000 people in Vienna, Austria.

Some other lighthearted self-penned songs have included “Viagra” and “Klonen kann sich lohnen,” meaning “Cloning Can Make Sense.”

In 2000 and 2002, Raabe and the orchestra also produced two albums of pop song covers done in the musical style of the ‘20s and ‘30s. The songs covered included Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again” and Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb.”

“That was a joke for us,” Raabe said, “but suddenly we were in the charts in Russia and in Italy.”

In fact, Raabe and the Palast Orchester’s pop song cover albums beat out sales of any Beatles albums in Lithuania.

The group certainly didn’t expect to make such commercial success with what they thought were joking albums, but then again, they also didn’t expect 18 years ago to still be performing in the group.

At the Berlin University of the Arts in 1986, Raabe co-founded the Palast Orchester with other university students simply to pay off a little of their tuition. But before Raabe had even graduated from the university, the group had already made quite a name for itself in Berlin. Eighteen years later, the group is still going strong.

Although not all their work has been serious, Raabe said that their main goal has been to preserve this era of music almost like a musicologist would.

“From the very beginning we were very serious with the music,” Raabe said, “and it was important for us to sound like the music from the old black and white pictures, from the old 78 records.”

Ultimately, the group hopes to expose this genre of music to all generations, and so far, the effort has been successful. Their audiences have included kindergartners as well as at least one centenarian, according to Raabe.

“It’s important that people see that this is music without age,” Raabe said. “Maybe the music is 70 years old, but if you sit there, it’s strange and modern in a way. I can’t explain. Our concert is not a visit to a museum, it’s still alive and powerful and elegant and crazy and ironic.”