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I’ve watched the movie “Fargo” over the years more times than I can count. If you had to ask me the thing that keeps me coming back, it’s not the human drama or even the fantastic character work by Francis McDormand and William H. Macy. It’s that I find the movie profoundly funny. It’s not altogether clear it was really intended to be perceived that way. The music is mournful and the scenery is bleak. The story ends terribly for everyone involved, with a kidnapped wife bludgeoned to death, a criminal shredded to pieces in a wood chipper, and the lead character in a state of profound sadness and uncertainty about the world she’s bringing her child into.

And yet, anyone who has watched the movie remembers the hilariously comic moments. The two local prostitutes who identify Steve Buscemi’s character as “funny lookin’,” the human leg stubbornly poking out of a bloody wood chipper or the sight of Marge Gunderson doubled over in late pregnancy, about to “barf” into the snow. The movie laughs with, and not at, its characters, even though — and this is crucial — they’re not actually laughing.  

It’s a story that could have been told a bunch of different ways but the profound sadness is leavened by an undercurrent of absurdist humor. The entire Coen Brothers library is full of those kinds of moments, and I think it’s what makes them special as filmmakers.

So how does this get us to my favorite band, The Hold Steady?

If you’re not aware of the band, they tend to meld a bar-band guitar-led sensibility with talk-sung lyrics about reprobates, drug addicts, criminals and troublemakers. Troubled people making bad decisions. The band has been at it for more than 20 years now in various combinations of members, but they’re now a six-piece, including two guitarists, a keyboardist, bassist, drummer and lead singer.

They also have an absolutely ravenous fan base, of which I am happy to be a member. They only play 15 or 20 shows a year, in clusters around a few different cities around the world. People travel to see them from all over to share in familiar rituals and sing-along moments and to participate in the joy of a transcendent shared experience.

Like the Coen brothers, the subjects of Hold Steady lyrics are often incorrigible, unhinged fuck-ups. They’re drug dealers or drug addicts or criminals or just small-time losers determined to wreck their lives. They often end up in a hospital or bleeding in vestibules or in jail or just societally marooned. Happy endings are few and far between and if you knew most of the characters in their stories personally, you’d probably send their calls to voicemail lest you be called upon to help post bail on the regular.

The intensely contradictory aspect to their music, though, is that the songs and the albums that contain these stories are often the experience of an iridescent joy in the face of these gruesome events. The listener is often taken to a place that feels like a kind of human party, celebrating life even when it’s absurd. It’s a difficult thing to explain to people who aren’t really into it, but it makes perfect sense once you’re inside the fandom.

What I think I’ve come to realize is that the reason the songs work is the humor.

Many of the songs function as brief character studies, a very detailed view into a brief moment of human experience. The storytelling is rich with specifics and it’s in those specifics that some of the absurdity of modern life gets turned from the mundane to the sublime.

I had this realization in a very acute way last week when I was driving. I was listening to a bunch of songs in a dynamic playlist, and one of their songs called “Epaulets” came up. It’s a fan favorite but not one they play very often. Something about the tempo changes and complex lyrics makes it tough to play live, which tracks.

With nothing to do but drive, I started saying the lyrics out loud rather than just singing along, and I realized that what made the song special was how outrageously funny it is. The first couplet in the song is: “She sends a text from the exit, says she’s on her way over, in an ocelot coat with the epaulet shoulders.” I don’t know what an ocelot coat looks like but there’s something profoundly hilarious about that as a detail, especially with the ludicrous peculiarity of an ocelot coat topped with gaudy epaulets. I’m laughing now even saying it out loud.

The song goes through a short story of what could only be described as a disastrous hook-up. The narrator and the becoated woman in question go back to her parents’ house, even though she’s technically been asked to stop bringing hook-ups there. She seems to be in a state of mental breakdown, apparently worried about either overdosing on amphetamines or having a heart attack, or both. Meanwhile, the narrator is eying up her footwear, with the incredible rhyming couplet, “Then she takes off her moccasins. The buckskin always sucks me in.”

The woman goes on to have a full-on breakdown, locked in the bathroom, pulling the place apart, unwrapping bandages and toothbrushes, and hallucinating about cotton balls being clouds. Finally, the song ends with the narrator acknowledging that they’re in a relationship doom loop where everything will just fall apart again but he comes back to the jacket one more time:  “Every time the clouds roll in you can’t get sentimental and her jacket makes her look just like a general.”

I’ve listened to this song probably hundreds of times over the past five years or so. I was driving down the highway cackling out loud at the audacity and imagination to turn such a weird little character moment into an entire song. It reminded me of the Mike Yamagita scene from “Fargo,” which is a strange and often-discussed moment in the movie where Marge meets an old high school friend who hits on her in a deeply sad and uncomfortable way. It turns out to be a pivotal moment in solving the kidnapping case to which she’s been assigned.

To my taste, the best comedies often aren’t comedies in any traditional sense at all. “One Battle after Another,” for example, is one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time; yet I don’t think anyone would call it a comedy. It’s the joy in seeing these detailed character moments that bring the story to life in a way that feels absurd and real and relatable. I can’t really tell you why it’s funny when Benicio del Toro’s Sensei character says that he’s had “a few small beers,” but I can tell you that the line has made me laugh more in the months since I saw the movie than probably any other line I saw in a movie this year.

The Hold Steady’s catalog is full of songs like “Epaulets” and it’s a real testament to their strength as a band and as writers that it is a relatively minor song in their pantheon. Virtually every song has at least one moment like that if not several. Sometimes it’s the joy in a turn of phrase or a well-observed detail, and feeling is often the kind of recognition of the absurdity of modern life that you find yourself having with your best friends.

It’s the humor in a guy being detained by the cops as a witness to a crime he’s not even sure about can only remember details like that the car might have been a rental and had satellite radio and that they made out in a bathroom – do you actually need to know which bathroom, officers? Or that the woman he’s obsessed with has smoked Virginia Slims since she was seven years old because she thinks she’s getting a better deal because of their length. Or that the horse that won the race was called Chips Ahoy!, at least I think it was.

The band’s catalog has a million of these Zevon-esque moments, and it’s why I’m constantly drawn back to them, just like I am the Coen brothers. It’s dark humor for dark times, but if two negatives make a positive, then it’s reassuring when we can Stay Positive.