Here’s what I did to accomplish this.
In my comments.php file, I removed the line
<p class="nocomments">Comments are closed.</p>
.
Then, in my index.php file, find this line
comments_popup_link(__('Comments (0)'), __('Comments (1)'), __('Comments (%)'))
and change it to this
if ( comments_open() ) {
comments_popup_link(__('Comments (0)'), __('Comments (1)'), __('Comments (%)'));
} ?>
Then on any page you turn off comments for, you won’t see “Comments are off” or “Comments are closed”.