Why Is This Man Laughing?

Abstract

There is a good deal of humor, from dry and ironical to raunchy and tasteless, in the music and live monologues of Lou Reed, both as a member of the Velvet Underground and as a solo artist. To examine Reed’s wide-ranging humor in terms of the three major categories comprising the philosophy of humor (Superiority theory, Incongruity theory, and Relief theory) is to appreciate the nuances of a rock humorist who could at one point be heard laughing at the end of a song about heroin’s destructiveness and at another point delivering a scathing but hilarious attack on well-known rock journalists who annoyed him. As this analysis demonstrates, the diversity of tone, subject matter, and manner of delivery of Reed’s humor reflects an artist who satisfied, in terms defined as much by courage as by literary skill, the three classic divisions of humor, suggesting that despite his reputation for writing dark and often cynical songs about taboo topics, Lou Reed enjoyed hearing the sound of laughter, sometimes his own, when he gave free expression to his comic genius.

Notes

1 Quoted in Levy (228).

2 Lester Bangs did not laugh: Lou Reed “belie[d] all his achievements...by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henny Youngman in the center ring, mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch” (171).

3 Philosopher Mike Martin notes that “much enjoyment of humor is never expressed in laughter, either because an inclination to laugh is suppressed or because the humor is enjoyed without so much as a felt inclination to laugh” (175).

4 A Reed family friend described Yiddish humor to Bockris as “very much a put-down humor....It’s always got a little touch of mean” (19).

5 “The Gift” is the second track, and the main comic relief, on the sonic assault known as White Light/Light Heat—which, at the time of its release, Crawdaddy! reviewer Sandy Pearlman called an album of “albeit-not-hilarious but certainly authentic humor” (61).