“Black humour”: the 1992 Lou Reed lyric that epitomised his comic edge
He may not have outwardly shown it in his personality, but buried beneath the stone-faced exterior, Lou Reed was always something of a comedian.
Of course, comedy is a subjective thing, and I’m certainly not going to suggest that he’d have been able to hold his own doing a tight five stand-up set, but Reed had a sense of humour at the very least, which is more than can be said of many of his contemporaries. Not everything he did was meant to be taken as humorous, but within a lot of his songs were lines that possessed the ability to produce a wry smile, or even a chuckle if lucky.
For example, despite the song being about his close friend and collaborator Andy Warhol’s attempted assassination by radical feminist and SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanas, ‘Andy’s Chest’ is packed with punchlines that turn an otherwise grisly affair into a lighthearted romp.
It’s not always whole songs that are amusing, though, and lines like “too busy sucking on a ding-dong” from the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sister Ray’ are hardly meant to be taken seriously and show his mastery over a simple turn of phrase. Lulu, his collaborative swan song with Metallica, on the other hand, whether intentionally funny or not, manages to produce a laugh a minute on account of it being so ludicrously absurd in its concept and delivery.
However, sometimes it isn’t as obvious to the listener when Reed is trying to be funny, and often, his interpretation of comedy can spill over into dark tragedy. The further you dive into his catalogue, the more this becomes apparent, and on his 1992 album, Magic and Loss, he was going all in on trying to create comedy out of a range of horrifying situations.
Around this period, he was dabbling more with spoken word and would often present his live shows as poetry recitals rather than as typical gigs. Speaking to Reflex around the time of the album’s release, he explained how the show differed from his usual fare and how the record itself had plenty of his ‘unique’ brand of humour scattered throughout.
“The guys aren’t there: there’s no band,” he said, noting his change of approach to performing. “On the other hand, the humour in the lyrics is much more obvious, and some of the edge in the lyrics is also a lot more obvious.”
He continued, talking more about how the lyrical content of Magic and Loss contained some material he was incredibly proud of, with one song in particular making him smirk even if nobody else found it funny. “There’s a song called ‘Harry’s Circumcision’, which you can take in a couple of ways,” he said. “One of the ways is that it’s funny. I think I get classified in the black humour section, which I don’t really think is true, myself.”
The thing is, ‘Harry’s Circumcision’ is one of the darkest songs in Reed’s discography, and without wanting to spoil the twist for those who haven’t heard it, it deals with subjects such as body dysmorphia and mutilation. For him to not quite understand why people wanted it to be labelled as ‘black humour’ is a little odd, because this is poetry taken straight from the gallows, and a product of the most depraved corners of Reed’s mind. Its humour, on the other hand, is certainly arguable.
