https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist
Tom Lehrer died last weekend, more than four decades after rumors of his death had first gone into circulation. He didn’t bother to contradict them, publicly claiming that he figured they would “cut down on the junk mail.” That quip proved not just that he was still alive, but that his wit was intact. And it was his wit, combined with a facility on the piano, that made him famous: mercilessly satirizing everything from the Boy Scouts to Harvard, his alma mater, to New Math to Vatican II to World War III, his lively show-tune pastiches became defining pieces of Cold War-era comedy — or in any case, defining pieces of early Cold War-era comedy.
A professor of mathematics for most of his career, he performed and recorded music mostly in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, beginning with his first concert, given as a graduate student in 1950, and ending with another in Copenhagen in 1967.
There was also an early-seventies coda in the form of a few songs written for PBS’ children’s show The Electric Company and a performance at a George S. McGovern rally. But by then, the frame of American culture had shifted. “The Vietnam War is what changed it,” Lehrer said in 1981. “Everybody got earnest. My purpose was to make people laugh and not applaud. If the audience applauds, they’re just showing they agree with me”: an observation today’s would-be satirists would do well to bear in mind.
Whether or not you have any aspirations of your own in that tradition, you can listen through the entirety of Lehrer’s recorded work in the YouTube playlist above and understand why his comic star burned so brightly — and, through the nearly sixty years that have followed, never quite burned out. Though clearly written in the spirit of Eisenhower-era liberalism, these songs (released by their author into the public domain a few years ago) don’t shy away from the absurdities of what Lehrer himself would not, with a straight face, be able to call the human condition. First tested out on campus, they also developed an early form of what we’ve come to think of as the “college” sensibility in popular music. In some sense, Lehrer never left that way of seeing the world behind — nor, like a true student, did he ever get around to finishing his Ph.D.
Related content:
Tom Lehrer Releases His All of Catchy and Savage Musical Satire Into the Public Domain
Hear Tom Lehrer Sing the Names of 102 Chemical Elements to the Tune of Gilbert & Sullivan
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
