At the end of “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the Coen brothers’ movie set in the Greenwich Village music scene in 1961, the main character, a gifted but struggling folk singer about to give up, left the stage of the legendary. Gaslight Café as a newcomer takes its place. What is clear after the first note is that it is Bob Dylan at the start of one of pop music’s greatest careers.
This juxtaposition leaves the viewer with a lingering question about success: What does Bob Dylan have that Llewyn Davis doesn’t? Genius? Luck? Schedule? The movie is too elusive for a single explanation, but forced to pick one, I’d say it’s a sense of humor. It may sound strange, because in the public imagination, Dylan, the dark-faced protest singer turned Nobel Prize-winning croaking poet, strikes a deadly serious figure.
But if there’s one under-examined aspect of this most famous and scrutinized singer, who turns 80 on Monday, inspiring new biographies and best-ofs, it’s his fertile comedy. While he’s spent six decades singing about heartache, apocalypse, and betrayal, a cockeyed humor has always informed his grim worldview. It can be oblique, less of a joke than a joke, but critical enough for its art to place it in the pantheon of great funny Jews.
There is perhaps no better proof of the importance of the funny in Dylan’s art than the fact that he denied it. In a rare 2017 interview, Dylan himself dismissed the idea that he was a jester, emphasizing righteous hymns like “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. But the first prank Dylan made was to pose as a truth-teller. From the start, he made up benign lies about himself and mixed serious, socially conscious songs with dark comedies. In the oldest bootleg of him performing at Gaslight, from 1961, one of the only original songs is “Talkin ‘Bear Mountain Picnic Blues,” a tongue-in-cheek account of a disaster in the news: An Overbooked Cruise Ship. sank in the Hudson River, a tragedy born of greed. Hear this 60-year-old recording of a then-unknown Dylan singing a block from where the Comedy Cellar now stands and you’ll hear the familiar sound of dark jokes that make you laugh.
The comedy club hadn’t been invented when Bob Dylan arrived in New York City that year, so the few blocks from cafes and clubs he performed in, what historian Sean Wilentz called “his Yale College and its Harvard ”, was not only home to folk singers but also comics like Joan Rivers, Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby. (This is the era described in “The Wonderful Mrs. Maisel.”) To a sponge like Dylan, that artist’s cross-pollination mattered. What these audiences expected to laugh too. As Robert Shelton, who helped launch Dylan with his review in this article, writes in his recently re-edited biography, “No Direction Home,” customers “responded more to Dylan’s mind than to his intense material. and slow.
His early performances had comic book pieces. Using long guitar strings, he joked that the instrument needed a haircut. The first genre of song that gained attention was talk blues, a comic book form dating back to the 1920s with standard chord progressions backing up jokey lines and topical references – not all that different from a set. of stand-up. Some of these songs were recorded on albums, others did not become available until later. One of the first didn’t come out until 2010. “Talking John Birch Society Blues” usurped the paranoia of the anti-Communist organization, with a narrator finding suspicious activity in the glove box, the TV, even on the American flag. (“I found out there were red stripes!) It ends with him all alone investigating himself.
Dylan presents himself in these songs as an unhappy Everyman, a fool, a coward overwhelmed if not oppressed by events. Moving away from politics, Dylan’s songs have gotten more bizarre and downright silly, with lyrics that are, like jokes, concise. Think about the opening of “On the Road Again,” a 1965 masterpiece of dizzying absurdity about a girlfriend’s dysfunctional family: “Well I wake up in the morning there are frogs. in my socks / Your mum, she’s hiding in the cooler / Your daddy walks around wearing a Napoleon Bonaparte mask.
In addition to talking about blues and surreal scenes, Dylan has flashed borscht belt punchlines in songs like ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’, a rambling thread that begins with him singing, stopping, cracking and asking for a second take. Keeping that mistake sets the tone for the song, which includes a visit to a bank that ends with this quip: “They asked me for guarantees and I pulled my pants down.”
It appears on his funniest album, “Bringing It All Back Home,” whose cover features Dylan near an album by comedian Lord Buckley. Although Buckley died in New York City just a few months before Dylan’s arrival, he greatly influenced Dylan (and others, including Lenny Bruce and Robin Williams). The singer turned one of Buckley’s monologues into a song, “Black Cross”, and borrowed language like “jingle-jangle” for “Tambourine Man”. Buckley was famous for rebooting Bible stories into hipster slang, a tactic Dylan appropriated in songs like “Highway 61 Revisited”. (“God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe said, ‘Man, you must put me on top.'”)
Over the next decade, Dylan had grown into one of the biggest stars in the world, as his songs grew darker and more personal, deepening grief. But even his harshest songs often carried a light spirit. In the opening to “Idiot Wind” (1975), he sings that he killed a man and took his wife, who inherited a million dollars; when she died he got the money. After a pause, he adds with a feeling deeply at odds with the smirk: “I can’t help myself if I’m lucky.”
After a period of fallow (every era of Dylan has its champions, but the hardest case to argue is the relatively joyless 1980s), it has seen an artistic and commercial resurgence over the past quarter-century. This late-era Dylan managed to be both heavier and lighter, darker but also more clumsy.
In a tumultuous episode of Pete Holmes’ podcast, director Larry Charles (“Borat”) recalled how Dylan became obsessed with Jerry Lewis films, so much so that Dylan collaborated with Charles on a pilot for a burlesque series for HBO. The musician eventually lost interest (the show was “too sloppy”) but co-wrote a bizarre, widely aired drama with Charles, “Masked & Anonymous”. In this 2003 film, a man confides in a character played by the singer: “What did the monkey say to the cheetah at the card game? I thought you were a cheetah.
Late Dylan favors daddy jokes so old-fashioned they almost seem transgressive, a liberating escape from his enigmatic image. When he tells a joke on his 2001 album, “Love and Theft,” it’s the comedic equivalent of going electric. I was tempted to boo, but I came to respect it.
His most revealing project of the past decades has been “Theme Time Radio Hour,” over 100 episodes hosted by Dylan, each organized around a theme. Produced by Eddie Gorodetsky, a former David Letterman writer, the show has an ongoing interest in comedy, including arcane stand-ups and sitcoms, comic book interviews, and cheesy jokes.
These hours show that for Dylan, humor is not incidental. It’s not a comedic relief either. It functions as it does in Chekhov’s plays, as a fundamental part of the existence of an artist who believes that, as Dylan says, life is just a joke. One of the best episodes focuses on laughter. Dylan describes her musicality, explaining that she has a rhythm. He digs into history for pieces of laughter. Speaking into a gritty dead end that increasingly sounds like the voice of stand-up Steven Wright, Dylan seems to despise canned laughter, a betrayal of one of the last things you can trust. “You can fake an orgasm,” he croaked. “But you can’t pretend you’re laughing.”
