ANGELEST LOSLehrer has passed away. Lehrer was a well-known and learned musical satirist who made fun of marriage, politics, racism, and the Cold War. He mainly gave up singing to return to teaching math at Harvard and other colleges. He was ninety-seven.
According to longtime friend David Herder, Lehrer passed away in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home on Saturday. He didn’t say what caused his death.
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Well into his late seventies, Lehrer had continued to teach mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He also abandoned his own copyright in 2020, allowing anyone to use his lyrics in any way without paying for them.
Lehrer, a Harvard prodigy who graduated with a degree in mathematics at the age of 18, quickly focused his razor-sharp intellect on historical customs and contemporary issues. His compositions included “The Old Dope Peddler” (spoken to a tune reminiscent of “The Old Lamplighter”), “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “Be Prepared” (in which he made fun of the Boy Scouts), and “The Vatican Rag,” in which the atheist Lehrer made fun of the rituals and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Lyric sample: Get on your knees and tinker with your rosaries. Show respect by bowing your head and genuflecting repeatedly.
He played the songs with a flamboyant flair reminiscent of musical greats like Stephen Sondheim, a lifelong friend, and Gilbert and Sullivan, while accompanied on piano. For his humorous takes on politics and culture, Lehrer was frequently compared to his contemporaries Allen Sherman and Stan Freberg. Among others, Randy Newman and Weird Al Jankovic mentioned Lehrer as an influence.
He scoffed at the prospect of nuclear war, condemned discrimination, and made fun of the genres of music he didn’t enjoy, such as current jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and folk tunes.
However, he attacked in such a sophisticated, even courteous, way that hardly anyone raised an objection.
“Tom Lehrer is the most brilliant song satirist ever recorded,” is a quote from musicologist Barry Hansen. In addition to co-producing the boxed collection of Lehrer’s songs, “The Remains of Tom Lehrer,” in 2000, Hansen had played Lehrer’s music on his syndicated “Dr. Demento” radio program for decades.
In actuality, Lehrer’s body of work was rather small—roughly three dozen songs.
“I wrote a song when I had a humorous concept. And if I didn’t, I didn’t,” Lehrer said in a rare interview with The Associated Press in 2000. “I wasn’t a typical writer who would approach a typewriter and insert a sheet of paper. And I simply stop writing when I stop. I didn’t experience writer’s block.
When he started writing songs in the early 1950s to entertain his friends, he unintentionally got into performing. He soon began performing them at coffee shops in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, area while continuing to teach and get a master’s degree in mathematics at Harvard.
The songs “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,” which parodied the attitudes of the Old South, and “Fight Fiercely, Harvard,” which suggested how a prissy Harvard blueblood might sing a football fight song, were included on his debut album, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” released in 1953.
Lehrer started performing his material in concerts all over the world after serving in the Army for two years. His live CD “An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer,” which was nominated for a Grammy in 1960 for outstanding comedic performance (musical), and his other album “More of Tom Lehrer” were both published in 1959.
However, at about the same time, he mostly stopped touring and went back to teaching math, though he continued to write and perform sometimes.
According to Lehrer, he never felt at ease making public appearances.
“I enjoyed it up to a point,” he said in a 2000 interview with The Advocate. “But to me, going out and performing the concert every night when it was all available on record would be like a novelist going out and reading his novel every night.”
For the landmark topical comedy program “That Was the Week That Was,” which aired in 1964 and foreshadowed “Saturday Night Live” ten years later, he did produce a political satire song every week.
The next year, he published the songs as part of an album called “That Was the Year That Was.” Among the materials was “Who’s Next?” which speculates as to which government—perhaps Alabama—will receive the nuclear weapon next. (He didn’t have to inform his audience that, at the time, it was a stronghold of segregation.) “Pollution” examines the then-novel idea that lakes and rivers might need to be cleaned up.
In the 1970s, he also composed music for the educational children’s program “The Electric Company.” In 2000, he told AP that he was significantly more satisfied when he heard from those who had profited from his satirical works than when he received appreciation for any of them.
The 1980 musical revue “Tomfoolery” used his songs again, and in 1998, he made a rare public appearance in London at a gala honoring Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of that musical.
Lehrer, the son of a prosperous necktie designer, was born in New York City in 1928. He recounted a carefree upbringing on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where he spent day and night strolling through Central Park and seeing to Broadway performances with his family.
He entered Harvard at the age of 15 after missing two grades, and after earning his master’s degree, he spent years attempting in vain to earn a doctorate.
“I spent many, many years satisfying all the requirements, as many years as possible, and I started on the thesis,” he once stated. It’s a great life, yet all I wanted was to be a graduate student. I wanted to be a Ph.D. and a graduate student at the same time, but that’s not possible.”
In order to avoid the severe New England winters, he started teaching part-time at Santa Cruz in the 1970s.
He admitted that occasionally a student would sign up for one of his classes based only on their familiarity with his tunes.
When he said, “But it’s a real math class,” “I’m not a funny theorist. Therefore, those folks go really quickly.
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This report was written by John Rogers, a former journalist for the Associated Press. In 2021, Rogers stepped down from The AP.
