“First you get down on your knees, fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect and, Genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!”
Tom Lehrer died on Saturday. The world is a little less smart, and whole lot less funny.
I had to be told of his death by a friend, and I find that oddly infuriating. I should have known. I should have been aware of Tom Lehrer. In the past few decades, I had rarely listened to the songs he wrote – many before I was born 63 years ago. But they are as relevant today as they once were. As sharp and cautionary. Perhaps they are more relevant. That’s why I am angry with myself for having lost touch.
If someone like me, who once held Lehrer in such esteem, had largely forgotten about him, how can I expect younger generations to value what he had to impart?
Tom Lehrer was a musical satirist like no one before or since
Let’s start with this simple fact. Tom Lehrer was a genius.
Not a musical genius. An across-the-board, certifiable genius. Before he ever embarked on a career in music, Lehrer earned a bachelor's and master's in mathematics from Harvard. He served on the faculty at Harvard and MIT, among other schools. He never completed his doctorate, in part because he did a two-year stint in the army right in the middle of his doctoral studies.
But there may have been another reason he never got to put the “Dr." before his name. Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, Tom Lehrer was pursuing a second career as a performer.
There were two brilliant comedians in the era who used song satire as their weapon of choice. One was Allan Sherman. Sherman was an everyman. Heavyset, ethnic, with a rough voice like your loud-mouth uncle. He skewered pop culture by rewriting the lyrics to well-known songs from the folk and classical traditions. Think Weird Al in the pre-rock era.
The other was Lehrer. He was the opposite of Sherman in so many ways. Erudite, tall and thin. Where Sherman had the broad, open vowels of a Midwesterner, Lehrer was all New York. Not the accent, just the attitude. He would have been a confederate of Dorothy Parker had he been born a few decades earlier.
Lehrer released his first album in 1953, simply entitled Songs by Tom Lehrer. He released it on Lehrer Records. The first track was a light-hearted destruction of his dear alma mater, “Fight Fiercely, Harvard.”
“How shall we celebrate our victory
We shall invite the whole team up for tea."
But it was on the second track where Lehrer endeared himself to a generation of beats.
“When the shades of night are falling
Comes a fellow everyone knows
It’s the old dope peddler
Spreading joy wherever he goes.”
The Old Dope Peddler was the first of many songs in which Lehrer took dead aim at the things not discussed in polite society. On his second album, More of Tom Lehrer, he wrote comic odes to incest (“Oedipus Rex” – a boy who “really loved his mother”), Sadomasochism (“The Masochism Tango”), and everyone’s guilty pleasure, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”
That is the album on which he also introduced his 1,000-words-a-minute tribute to chemistry, “The Elements,” destined to become a favorite party trick of the overeducated.
“Soon we’ll be out amid the cold world’s strife
Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life.”
Tom Lehrer had a way with a simile. That one, from “Bright College Days,” could have been the basis for quite a commencement address.
Lest you think that these songs were irrevocably bound up in their era, I can tell you that about twenty years ago, I played some songs from his first album for a group of eleven-year-old boys. Upon hearing “The Irish Ballad,” an old-fashioned Irish murder song about a young girl who meticulously slaughters her entire family, one of my young listeners remarked in amazement, “I’ve got to meet this chick.”
There were various reports over the years that Lehrer gave up his career as a satirist because of performance anxiety or because he wanted to devote himself to his academic career. Both may be true, but neither seems entirely satisfying. He continued to release live albums in the early 1960s but did not write new material until his final original album, That Was the Week That Was, in 1965.
That album was filled with songs drawn from current headlines, and rarely has a comedy album had more to say about the current state of things. From the opening “National Brotherhood Week”…
“Oh the poor folks hate the rich folks and the rich folks hate the poor folks
All of my folks hate all of your folks
It’s American as apple pie.”
To the barbed takedowns of political leaders like Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican George Murphy, Lehrer offers a snapshot of what people were talking about circa 1965.
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He wrote songs about the nuclear bomb and pornography. He wrote an amazing rap about math. He wrote lyrics like…
“The breakfast garbage that you throw into the Bay
They drink at lunch in San Jose”
in "Pollution" and...
“You too can be a big hero, if you learn to count backwards to zero
'In German und English, I’ve learned to count down
“Und I’m learning Chinese,' says Wernher von Braun”
...in “Wernher von Braun,” about the scientists who would well their bomb-making technology to the highest bidder.
Lehrer did not put out any new albums after That Was the Week That Was. He garnered newfound acclaim in the early 1980s when British theater producer Cameron Mackintosh staged a review of his songs called Tomfoolery. But by that point, Lehrer was already receding into legend status.
I’ve wondered over the years if his withdrawal from satire grew out of a recognition of its limitations. I hope not, but it is a real concern. Lehrer watched the world move ever closer to the brink of self-destruction. And Lehrer was smarter than most of us. He would have picked up on what was happening before the rest.
It is sad that he died just as Stephen Colbert was fired from CBS for what many perceive as political satire. We are living through a period in which powerful forces are seeking to silence comedians because tyranny fears being laughed at more than anything else. It is a time in which we need the Tom Lehrers of the world more than ever. Someone to look our fears in the face and laugh.
“And we will all bake together when we bake
They’ll be nobody present at the wake
With complete participation
In that mass annihilation
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.”
RIP, Mr. Lehrer. Wherever you find yourself, fight fiercely and funnily.