Lou Reed’s comical fear of someone “laser-beaming” him to death
Perhaps it’s down to his ice-cool persona, but it’s hard to imagine Lou Reed ever having much of a laugh, or being able to let loose and chuckle at something he found funny.
However, if you were to inspect his work as a solo artist or with The Velvet Underground more closely, you’d realise that his sense of humour has always been present in his lyricism, and in addition to that, he was known for coming out with witty quips in interviews, showing off his taste for a good gag. It may have been perceived as dry, or perhaps even on the darker and edgier side of humorous, but Reed’s output is full of gems that will have you producing a wry smile.
Take, for example, a song like ‘Andy’s Chest’, which is about close friend Andy Warhol getting shot by Valerie Solanas. The subject matter shouldn’t be a laugh-a-minute, but he somehow manages to twist the story to feature lines like “Cause you know what they say about honey bears / When you shave off all their baby hair / You have a hairy-minded pink bare bear”, which is decidedly funnier than any song about an assassination attempt deserves to be.
However, despite this sense of humour that he would occasionally show off, he also had plenty of fears, and it would seem that one of his greatest concerns in life was the prospect of war breaking out under the Ronald Reagan administration. US relations with other countries, particularly the Soviet Union, were at their lowest since the end of the Second World War, and the threat of a full-scale nuclear war was playing on the minds of many Americans, not least Reed.
That being said, the way in which he addressed these concerns was humorous in itself. In a 1981 interview with journalist Jim Sullivan, he proclaimed that “we’d all be ashes” if a nuclear war broke out, and compared it to the Bay of Pigs incident during the Vietnam War, which came to be while he was studying at Syracuse University. “Those of us who were in school were all ready to hop in cars and drive to the mountains and hide. Wasn’t everything going to end then?”
However, the way he saw things was unusual, and he urged people to not sit and worry about these sorts of threats on a daily basis, bringing up an example of violence on a local level as a darkly comedic means of comparing the two threats. “You’ve got to remember: This is New York,” he claimed, “A few weeks ago, a guy got shot with a bow and arrow, and there’s a guy running around with a meat cleaver down on the subway. I think it at least shows some innovation on physical assaults on the citizenry, going back to more primitive weapons. Now, I would find it perhaps scary if they found out that somebody were laser-beaming people to death in the subway.”
Rather understandably, Reed’s fear of the modern advancement of weapons at the time was relatable, but the way in which he phrased his fears as though he was terrified of being cartoonishly vaporised while waiting for a train goes to show just how much his gallows humour was always present, even when talking about the most morbid subject matter.
