You can tell how much the critical establishment needs Bob Dylan by the praise heaped on his last studio album, 1997's "Time Out of Mind," which contained five excellent songs, five pretty good ones and one 161/2-minute bore. Music critics decided the album was all about death, and as this was, after all, the Voice of His Generation, it subsequently acquired meanings it couldn't support and became representative of something monumental even if in parts it was unlistenable.

The new "Love and Theft" is a much, much better album. The tunes are sharper, the singing stronger, the playing and production cleaner (Dylan produced it himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost; "Time Out of Mind" was produced by Daniel Lanois, who hears thematic complexity and thinks "mud"). Most important, it's funny.

Yes, funny. Remember how funny Dylan used to be? It wasn't just the drugs. "Love and Theft," with its full-throttle detours into American musical forms Dylan has previously only glanced at, proves that the 60-year-old isn't the cranky old geezer everybody assumed he'd turned into. The Chuck Berry boogie "Summer Days" alone contains more good lyrics than any album he's released since "Street Legal." "Why don't you break my heart one more time just for good luck," says the loser to the girl of his nightmares. Bob Hope would have paid good money for a line like that.

The album's title is the same as Eric Lott's classic 1995 scholarly study of minstrelsy, but scholarly it isn't. And as for minstrelsy, Dylan had already transcended blackface when he sang "Corrina, Corrina" to rapt beatniks in 1960. The Charley Patton tribute, "High Water," a banjo-driven blues about a flood, chillingly suggests a life of crushing poverty. On the other hand, "Bye and Bye," a leisurely walking blues, has the singer waxing cool and slick about "dreams that haven't been repossessed." The country jazz-tinged "Floater," featuring some fine violin by Larry Campbell, is characterized by over-enunciated "r" sounds and the neatest precis of "Romeo and Juliet" this side of Tom Stoppard (Romeo: You got a poor complexion/Juliet: If it bothers you, shove off). The voice of his generation has become the man of a thousand faces, and musically it makes perfect sense.

It's stupid to debate whether or not this is the best Dylan album since . . . whenever. Old Mr. Zimmerman himself pre-empts the question with a curt, hilarious riposte on "Summer Days": "She said, 'You can't repeat the past,' " he sings wistfully, and then, with a sudden jolt of clarity, "I said, 'You can't? What do you mean you can't? Of course you can.' "