The big hilarious joke this morning on TV and radio is that Alistair Darling has been seeking relief from the country's economic travails by going to see - wait for it - Leonard Cohen!

How could he do this, the talking heads ask, when Cohen's known as being uniquely depressing? The notion that Leonard Cohen has always had a reputation as the poet of swinging suicides is now so deeply embedded in people's heads that last week I heard David Davies (the sports hack) and Gabby Logan talking about it on the radio as if it were as incontrovertible a fact as Pete Docherty's interest in heroin.

I'm getting tired of it. If anyone's listening, I remember the arrival of Leonard Cohen's first record and he was known as being lugubrious and introspective but *not remotely depressing*. Since then he's been increasingly noted for his humour, both in his delivery and compositions. If you're the kind of person who can't recognise humour in songs unless it's delivered by somebody in a clown wig you probably don't appreciate this verse from "Chelsea Hotel".

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.
Those were the reasons and that was New York,
we were running for the money and the flesh.
And that was called love for the workers in song
probably still is for those of them left.

Or that if you want to make jokes about his voice then you'll have to wait until he's finished himself. This is "Tower Of Song":

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the great beyond
They tied me to this table right here
In the tower of song

How many depressives bother writing something so delectable about oral sex as this from "Light As The Breeze"?

So I knelt there at the delta,
at the alpha and the omega,
I knelt there like one who believes.
And the blessings come from heaven
and for something like a second
I'm cured and my heart
is at ease.

And when most artists find that an ex-lover has stolen all their money and ransacked their pension fund, they hurry to write a self-piteous autobiography and then start weeping on the shoulder of every chat show host who will have them. They don't just shrug and go on tour. In fact, if Alistair Darling wanted a reminder of the important things in life and the value of treating triumph and disaster both the same, he could do no better than Leonard Cohen.