Leonard Cohen’s 10 funniest lyrics
Darkness and light is an obsession that Leonard Cohen delved into throughout his life. As his most famous couplet proclaims, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Thus, he might be a profound poet, but that doesn’t mean his work doesn’t allow the levity of a laugh to creep into proceedings. After all, as Cohen said, “Poetry is just the evidence of life,” life is funny sometimes, so poetry should be too.
For some reason, it is quite a funny motif to picture Cohen playing tennis, but when he absconded to a Buddhist Monastery that is exactly what the monks sent him to do. Their goal was to get him to take life a little less serious. He had been informed that he “knew how to work but not how to play.” This all led Cohen to celebrate the mantra which he continued to extol long after he hung up his racket: “Lighten up! That’s what enlightenment means, to lighten up.”
He shared this message with us in the wisdom of his songbook. We might picture him in a dark suit singing ‘Hallelujah’, but more often than not, there was a brimming smile too. Therefore, we’ve decided to collate the lighter side of Leonard below with ten of his funniest lyrics. They might not be Steve Martin, but these lines certainly add some lightness to the weight of his wonder.
Leonard Cohen’s 10 funniest lyrics:
‘Closing Time’
“The place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night
And my very close companion
Gets me fumbling gets me laughing
She’s a hundred but she’s wearing
Something tight”
A tale of the wee desperate hours, as the dimming of the DJ lights tells you time will soon be called and at this rate, you’ll be going home alone. Cohen conjures up the comical side of drunken desperation with ‘Closing Time’, and its sexless insanity.
The biggest laugh in the accursed track is when the Lothario seems to have pulled a rather keen woman, and booze helps to blind the fact that she is, unfortunately, 100 years old. Now not to be ageist, but that surely would imply the death of a ladies’ man.
‘The Future’
“Give me crack and anal sex”
Cohen is an unflinching figure. He knows the power of words and he is willing to wield them. In this dark prognostication of a broken society, the crooner unexpectedly throws in crack and anal sex and gets a shocked cackle from the unsuspecting.
It’s dark, but there is something about this blunt profanity that proves amusing. Childish? Perhaps, but isn’t that all part of the modern age—where all we see is violence in movies and sex on TV. Follow that with bringing back Stalin and the Berlin Wall and you’ve got yourself a tale of crooked uncompromised fun.
‘Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On’
“Ah but don’t go home with your hard-on
It will only drive you insane
You can’t shake it (or break it) with your Motown
You can’t melt it down in the rain”
Once more, the Lothario delves into the comical side of sex, or lack thereof. As he once joked: “My reputation as a ladies’ man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.”
Somehow that seems hard to believe given how well he writes about the subject. His songs are like the memoir of a man who has had ten thousand love lives, and this wise advice is a self-deprecating as he lands in moments of loneliness. Never, ever, break it!
‘That Don’t Make It Junk’
“I fought against the bottle, but I had to do it drunk”
Cohen once proclaimed that “there is a joke in almost every song,” it’s just us to up to find it. That doesn’t prove to be a problem with the opening line of ‘That Don’t Make It Junk’. Once more, it’s certainly dark comedy, but is there such a thing as light gags about alcoholism?
It’s no laughing matter, but that doesn’t mean you can’t joke about it. Cohen embraces that as he pokes fun at the serious failures in his life. Pawning wedding rings and pouring a half-drank bottle down the drain are tales best told through the strained smile of seeing the other side, and it’s the melody that helps you to rest easy with these puns told from the top of hard-fought peace.
‘Anyhow’
“I know you have to hate me
But could you hate me less?
I used up all my chances
And you’ll never take me back
But there ain’t no harm in asking
Could you cut me one more slack?”
The pleading man is a pathetic one, and Cohen captures that with the sort of aplomb that implies he has definitely been there himself. Every line in ‘Anyhow’ has the sort of irritable charm that probably would lead to forgiveness too.
“Could you hate me less?” is a request that really shouldn’t conjure a chuckle but there is no doubting that something about its pithiness really tickles. The fact he doesn’t seem to be taking it seriously implies a sort of meta joke that he’s no stranger to this doghouse, and he knows how to get out.
‘Everybody Knows’
“Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah, give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you’ve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
…Without your clothes”
Poetry and songwriting are two different parties, and the rhythm with which this humour is extolled shows that Cohen was a master of both. Without breaking stride, he rattles off jokes about infidelity told with a clenched jaw.
Katharine S. White once said, “Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing does in the process and the innards are discouraged to any but the purely scientific mind.” That being said, for the scientific minds out there, the beauty of these gags is the melody with which they are delivered—Cohen’s paused delivery is perfect.
‘Chelsea Hotel #2’
“You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception”
Cohen’s tale of his time spent with Janis Joplin in the throes of the bohemian bedding spot of the Chelsea Hotel are legendary. He might have said he regretted being so candid about her in the past, however, with this line he exposed nothing other than her acid-tongued humour.
People poking fun at themselves is one of the oldest jokes in the book. Perhaps that is why you find it deployed so often in the depths of timeless folk. As Bob Dylan once said of his beloved genre: “Folk is nothing but a bunch of fat people.”
‘Tower of Song’
“So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll
I’m very sorry, baby, doesn’t look like me at all”
It is very rare for any artist to couple solemnity with a bit of a light-hearted flourish, but ‘Tower of Song’ almost seems to exhibit a sort of meta mastery that allows for a coy wink to his forebearers in song. He places himself in good company in the lineage of music but never has such posturing seemed so utterly devoid of ego, as he studiously looks to better his craft.
When he was rather comically inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which in its own way seems laughable) he recited the lyrics to this song, betraying the fact that there is wryness to words befitting of the joy of music that he’s singing about in the first place.
‘One of us Cannot be Wrong’
“I lit a thin green candle
To make you jealous of me
But the room just filled up with mosquitoes
They heard that my body was free”
Cohen delves into his self-deprecating mode once more, as he makes a fool of the self-pitying lover. With a teenage air of despair, he sings of a hard-luck guy who can’t catch a break even when he’s broken.
There is nothing funny about continual success, and double-down on failure exposes the British side of Cohen from his time spent on an isle whereby laughing at a disaster is par for the course. There is a beautiful image that goes along with these lines of a guy grumbling while covered in lumps and cursing himself in the mirror. Cohen’s best advice: Just move on, mate.
‘Going Home’
“I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit”
If you can’t laugh at yourself, then who can you laugh at? Cohen might measure the weight of poetry in gold, but he knows that all the profundity proclaimed about it is more in line with praise in the hot-air sense than anything of tangible worth. Throughout his back catalogue and poetry collection, he makes you aware that there are doctors and nurses out there too, he’s just a man “born with a golden voice”, as he jokingly extolls.
In ‘Going Home’ he delivers his ultimate comic confession: Leonard Cohen is nothing more than a lazy bastard who has been sewn into a suit. And in the act of calling this out, he rises above the others clinging to his coattails and we celebrate the earnest poet of Skid Row all over again.
