4 Times Leonard Cohen Had a Sense of Humor in His Music

He’s known for his serious, poetic tunes about everything from politics to mortality to redemption. However, singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen was not without his sense of humor. Let’s look at just four songs that showed how funny Leonard Cohen could be, even when singing about the hardships of being human.

1. “That Don’t Make It Junk”

Even in his saddest works, there always seems to be a bit of humor in Cohen’s music. He said himself that there is “a joke in almost every song.” “That Don’t Make It Junk” is on the darker side of Cohen’s brand of musical comedy, but it’s comedy nonetheless. Any recovering alcoholic would find some humor in the line “I fought against the bottle, but I had to do it drunk.”

2. “Everybody Knows”

If you’ve ever been done dirty by a lover or cheated on by a partner (and you’re not quite as sore about it now), you’ll probably find some humor in a few noteworthy lines of “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.”

The lack of rhyming makes this line even funnier, honestly.

3. “Anyhow”

Leonard Cohen’s humor was often a little self-deprecating, or at the very least directed at the pathetic nature of the song’s narrator. “Anyhow” is a great example of that. Cohen’s narrator on this track is a pathetic, begging man who ruins a potentially great relationship. Still, that doesn’t stop the main character of “Anyhow” from asking for one more shot. 

“I know you have to hate me / But could you hate me less? / […] But there ain’t no harm in asking / Could you cut me one more slack?” Let’s be real; we all know a guy like this.

4. “Closing Time”

This song from the 1992 album The Future has a little bit of camp to it. “Closing Time” is about trying to get lucky at a bar in a drunken haze, which proves unsuccessful for our narrator. It hasn’t exactly aged well, but there’s something pretty humorous about Cohen singing “She’s a hundred but she’s wearing something tight” when he himself was almost pushing 60 when this song came out. Though, the joke seems to be more about how pathetic the narrator of the song is in his desperation to get lucky.

Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images

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