LAUGHING LOUDON

After a two-year absence, Loudon Wainwright III returned to McCabe’s on Friday with a guitar case full of new material from his latest album “More Love Songs.”

But that’s like titling a volume of Edgar Allen Poe’s works “More Bird Poems,” considering this is the same guy who once sang that love is not “a tender trap” but “a suicide snare.” Yet beginning with his 1985 album “I’m Alright,” the veteran singer-songwriter-humorist has been tempering his poison-penned tunes with understanding and compassion, qualities that were even more apparent during a nearly two-hour solo acoustic show.

As a result, he came across less the incorrigible cynic than the unflappable skeptic. OK, so it’s a subtle change. But though he may still sourly mark a divorce in “Unhappy Anniversary,” when explaining a break-up to a child in “Your Mother and I” he no longer points a finger of blame (“your folks fell in love/love’s a very big hole”).

Wainwright’s new attitude would suggest that the way to approach a world full of pain, loneliness, loss and mortality is not to spit in its eye, but to laugh in its face.