The amount of Nick Cave-related comedy out there is pretty minuscule, perhaps because the dude has built an entire persona and career off of a fairly limited number of personal cliches: occasionally terrible Faulkner wannabe-isms, soap-opera melodrama, an obsession with dead or soon-to-be-dead women. (It might also have something to do with his perpetually perfect hair.) In fact, his new record with his new band Grinderman (recently reviewed in the Reader by Jessica Hopper) is to date the single best parody of the “Nick Cave” character, and it almost doesn’t even count, since Cave taking the piss out of his own persona somehow makes him seem even cooler.
I’d never really considered his immunity to being made fun of until this morning, when my RSS aggregator delivered today’s installment of the webcomic Lucid TV, which turns the execution-bound badass from “The Mercy Seat” into the straight man to a troupe of perpetually un-Hippocratic doctors. I’ve already read it about a dozen times today, LOL-ing every time.