He Did Twelve Encores, Six Of Which Were “Suzanne”

I’ve long been quite a fan of Leonard Cohen. A lot of people complain that his music is depressing and makes them want to commit suicide, but I actually find a lot of the music funny, albeit in a very eyebrow-waggling, droll kind of way.

For example, if I was at your parents’ house, and they’d gone away for the weekend and we were rifling through the vinyl in between swigging cans of medium-sweet cider and smoking joints with far too much tobacco in and I saw a bit of Leo; perhaps Songs of Love and Hate, I might consider putting it on the turntable.

I might have also considered Nashville Skyline, The White Album, Arrival or many others. If your parents were particularly cool, I might well have attempted a spinning of Back in DHSS.  (Fuckin’ hell, it’s Fred Titmus!)

But I digress: a few year ago I was idley listening to radio 4 and managed to accidentally listening to the enterity of Arthur Smith Sings Leonard Cohen, in which the South London comedian combines his normal absurdist humour with occasionally breaking into song. Leonard Cohen’s songs specifically.

At one point (and I’m paraphrasing a bit here because I can’t remember exactly what he said) he describes his favourite joke when he was eight years old. It’s this one.

I don’t swear, I don’t smoke and I don’t drink.

(pause)

Oh sod it, I’ve left my fags in the pub.

He then adds that just the other days he left his fags in the pub, said “Oh sod it, I’ve left my fags in the pub” and then realised he’d turned into his favourite joke from when he was eight.

Now I remember this joke clearly from my younger days, but I wouldn’t have said it was my favourite joke. The funniest thing that ever happened to me when I was eight was a story I was told by a classmate.

He described in detail how he was having a wee, which already caused me to smirk a bit.

He then described how, somehow he managed to knock a toilet roll into the toilet, currently full of his piss. This caused me to laugh out loud for the first time.

He obviously found it funny at the time because he’d started laughing and his dad had come up to see what all the commotion was about. I was having difficulty breathing by this point.

His dad walked into the toilet and through a series of events I can’t quite recall the details of, managed to drop the apple he was eating into the toilet.

By this point I was in hysterics. You know when you manage after quite a lot of effort to control yourself and then someone reminds you of what you were laughing at and you lose it again?

That’s what was happening to me at this point. I couldn’t stop.

I didn’t die laughing, like certain people, and I eventually recovered.

And yet not so long ago, when a sudden gust of wind blew the toilet roll into the toilet, I started giggling madly, recalling the original incident.

Put it this way, I’m never going to eat a apple in the toilet.