Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan, Our Most Underappreciated Comic

As he turns 80, don’t be fooled by his serious music. From the start, his work has been filled with a cockeyed humor that can range from corny jokes to dark wit.

At the end of “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the Coen brothers movie set in the Greenwich Village music scene of 1961, the title character, a gifted but struggling folk singer on the verge of giving up, leaves the stage of the fabled Gaslight Café as a newcomer fills his spot. What’s clear after the first note is that it’s Bob Dylan at the start of one of the greatest careers in pop music This juxtaposition leaves the viewer with a lingering question about success: What does Bob Dylan have that Llewyn Davis does not? Genius? Luck? Timing? The movie is too elusive for a single explanation, but forced to pick one, I’d argue it’s a sense of humor. This might seem odd, since in the public imagination, Dylan, the grim-faced protest singer turned croaking Nobel-winning poet, strikes a deadly serious figure. But if there is any underexamined aspect of this most celebrated and scrutinized singer, who turns 80 on Monday, inspiring new biographies and best-of lists, it’s his fertile comedy. While he spent six decades singing about heartache, apocalypse and betrayal, a cockeyed humor has always informed his bleak worldview. It can be oblique, less about jokes than jokiness, but critical enough to his art to place him in the pantheon of great Jewish funny men.