[Tom
Lehrer, one of the funniest—and wittiest, not to mention most irreverent—satirical
songwriters and singers ever to grace an American stage (or record album), died
at 97 at his home in Boston on 26 July 2025.
I was a fan, and so was my friend Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor
to Rick
On Theater, who composed a tribute to the comical math teacher. (Now, there’s an unlikely label!) Kirk, it
should be noted, is a composer, musician, and songwriter.
[If any reader doesn’t know Tom Lehrer, who stopped performing in 1967, check him out on one of the many videos posted to YouTube and other platforms (Kirk has included links to some of them in his homage), and, if you can catch it when it airs occasionally, PBS has a recording of Lehrer’s 1967 concert in Copenhagen. (It was airing in the past weeks, but it may no longer be in the schedule. It returns from time to time for multiple broadcasts, however.)
[Following Kirk’s profile of Lehrer, I’ve appended the New York Times obituary of Lehrer. It’s pretty comprehensive in the background and biographical details of the songwriting college professor. (There’s a link to another obit in Kirk’s tribute as well.)]
TOM LEHRER AND THE
COMIC SPIRIT
by Kirk Woodward
Are you a Tom Lehrer (1928-2005) enthusiast, or had you not heard of him until you read his obituary earlier this year? Not everyone knows about him, but Tom and I go a long way back.
My first encounter with his music occurred decades ago in Louisville, Kentucky, at the house of my best friend, Jay Paradis. One afternoon in the early 1960s, when his parents weren’t home, Jay opened the big record cabinet in the living room and showed me and a few others his parents’ collection of “party records.”
Today that might mean “dance music.” In those days it was the name for record albums that were considered off-color or at least disreputable, like those of Redd Foxx (1922-1991). One of those records showed a side view of an audience in an auditorium, with a spotlight singling out a distant figure on stage at a piano.
The album was An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer (Lehrer Records, 1959). At first listening I was a fan for life. There was nothing “dirty” about the songs; but there was plenty of parody, sardonic humor, cheerful melodies played cheerfully on the piano, and funny, perfectly crafted lyrics.
One of the things that impressed me most was that although I didn’t know much about the types of songs he parodied, I knew immediately what those songs had to be like. As it turned out I was right.
Oxford Languages defines a “cult figure” as “a writer, musician, artist, or other public figure who is greatly admired by a relatively small audience or is influential despite limited commercial success.” In this sense Lehrer is a cult figure, but he’s a major cult figure, if there is such a thing.
Fairly often I’ll mention him in conversation, and either the other person has no idea what I’m talking about, or we begin a vigorous round of quotations from Lehrer’s songs:
“Once the rockets go up, who cares
where they come down?
“That’s not my department,” says Wernher
von Braun.
He loved to burn down houses just to
watch the glow,
And nothing could be done, ‘cause he
was the mayor’s son.
Hurl that spheroid down the field, and fight, fight, fight!
That last quotation is from the football song “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” which Lehrer wrote while he was at Harvard (he was admitted at the age of 15), one of numerous times he combined the popular and the highly intelligent. Just thinking about the song’s title makes me laugh.
Although he rated a lengthy obituary in the New York Times (see below) Lehrer still falls, barely, in the “cult figure” category, a fact he doesn’t seem to have minded much. He estimated a few years ago that he had sold about two million records in his career, not a shabby number for a performer who introduced only three albums of original material (in six different releases) containing 36 songs.
Altogether as far as we know he wrote around 50 songs. His music is regularly re-released in some form or other. The most comprehensive collection, if one can get one’s hands on it, is the three CD collection The Remains of Tom Lehrer issued in 2000 by Rhino Entertainment, which includes four songs Lehrer wrote after his performing career was basically over.
That performing career was brief. Fortunately he can be seen on YouTube. A YouTube channel called “Silly Songs with Lehrer” provides a number of interviews with Lehrer.
Lehrer can also be seen in concert, ironically enough performing not in the United States, but in Copenhagen (the availability of the full concert is erratic, but individual songs from it are also there).
He was nearly at the end of his performing career when he gave that concert (1967); he accepted the invitation because he’d always wanted to see Scandinavia.
What is it about those songs of his, then? Why is it that we’re still listening to and enjoying them (I am, anyway) some seventy years or so after they were first performed, and that few of them have “dated?”
Lehrer’s songs can be categorized, loosely, as jolly mockeries and novelty numbers. His mockeries often take the sentimental songs of yesteryear and give them new and often grotesque contexts. They are not parodies in the sense that they put new words to existing melodies like Allan Sherman (1924-1973); his parody, or perhaps more accurately his “burlesquing” of the originals, lies in the lyrics, not necessarily in the music.
An example is the song “The Old Lamp-Lighter” (1946, music by Nat Simon, lyrics by Charles Tobias), an allegedly nostalgic look at a still earlier era. Lehrer, not very subtly, wrote “The Old Dope Peddler” “with his powdered happiness.”
(I mention this song because, as he has acknowledged, when he wrote it “dope” was not a major factor in most lives. Today the drug culture is much more prevalent, and the song now has an unintended resonance.)
Another song, “The Masochism Tango,” mocks a kind of song best represented perhaps by “So in Love,” a ballad by Cole Porter (1891-1964) from the great musical Kiss Me Kate (1948):
So
taunt me, and hurt me,
Deceive
me, desert me,
I’m
yours till I die . . .
Lehrer’s song, again not terribly subtly, piles up the number of things the singer will allow the loved one to do:
Bash in my brain,
And make me scream with pain,
Then kick me once again,
And say we’ll never part . . .
There are songs about college, an Irish ballad (in which things go very, very badly), a Western number, a number about the Old South, about the Army . . . whatever caught his attention.
The novelty numbers are varied and imaginative. The best known, perhaps, is “The Elements,” a rearranging of the periodic table that Lehrer set to “A Modern Major General” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance:
There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum,
selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen
and rhenium . . .
(Lehrer said his one experience on stage was playing the Pirate King in a production of Pirates in high school. The music of Gilbert and Sullivan was always important to him.)
(Arthur Sullivan (music; 1842-1900) and W. S. Gilbert’s [libretto; 1836-1911] The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is a comic opera in two acts. Its official première was in New York City in 1879, where it ran 100 performances and was well received by both audiences and critics. Its 1880 London début ran for 363 performances.)
Also in the novelty category are the songs he wrote for the United States version of the satirical TV show That Was the Week That Was (National Broadcasting Company, 1963-1965), and the ten songs he wrote for the educational TV program The Electric Company (Public Broadcasting Service, 1971-1977), devoted to helping children learn to read. (Lehrer remarked that he never found out if it worked.) The variety of his output is impressive, considering the relatively small number of songs he wrote.
I never met Tom Lehrer, although I wrote him a fan letter, and I’ve only met one person who did, an actor in the revue Tomfoolery (1980 in London, 1981 in New York City). I asked the actor what Lehrer was like, and he said, quoting Lehrer, “There’s a ‘p’ in ‘park.’”
For a person with a disapproving world view, Lehrer appears to have been good-humored and sociable. In interviews he speaks of friends and parties. He put his home address on his first albums, so people could write him for additional copies.
His number was in the Boston phone book for years after he became known. His stage persona was convivial, if sardonic. He was hardly a recluse or antisocial.
Instead, it seems clear that he was what the psychological approach Family Systems Therapy calls “self-differentiated,” that is, he knew what he was and what he wasn’t, and acted accordingly. He lived his life pretty much the way he wanted to and didn’t feel compelled to behave in the ways that some celebrities feel they must.
And he was a teacher most of his life, a profession that by necessity involves working with people. There is a definite element of teaching in his material. In a way every good artist is a teacher, introducing us to aspects of the world that we may not have been aware of before.
He taught undergraduate mathematics at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. At the latter school he also instituted and taught a class on musical theater, because he found that students didn’t know who Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) was. He considered Sondheim the greatest lyricist ever. (Curiously, he and Sondheim attended the same summer camp as children from 1937 to 1939.)
Sometimes Lehrer makes the connection with teaching explicit. Two of his songs are “That’s Mathematics” and “New Math.” And any comedian in some way wants to teach us about life. Lehrer was – as much as he was a mathematician – a comedian.
I called this article “Tom Lehrer and the Comic Spirit,” and what I have in mind is a comment by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) that “comedy is disruption.” Not all disruption is comedy – tragedy is disruption, too, but its rhythm is different. In comedy the disruption comes suddenly.
(For more on Shaw, see “Bernard Shaw, Pop Culture Critic” by Kirk Woodward [5 September 2012], “Two Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival, 2006)” [25 September 2012]. “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw” by Kirk Woodward [3 December 2015], “Re-Reading Shaw” by Kirk Woodward [3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September 2016], and “Shaw versus Shakes” by Kirk Woodward [8 September 2023].)
Lehrer’s songs often set up expectations and then disrupt them. I wonder if the songs above, as described, struck anyone as cheap or facile. It’s a fact that, particularly at first, Lehrer often got his effects by taking a subject and introducing murder or death in it, to disruptive effect.
This kind of disruption of expectation would certainly get a laugh at parties, which is where he first performed his songs. But does it have anything to do with art, or is it just a way of getting cheap laughs?
There are two answers to this question. The first is that Lehrer’s lyrics are invariably matched by lilting, pleasurable melodies that give the songs a higher dimension. Lehrer is in control of this matchup because he almost always writes both words and music.
In an interview he notes that he and the composer and singer Randy Newman (b. 1943) both “take some sardonic attitude and set it to very pleasant music.” It’s notable that a major influence on his songs was the jaunty group of patter songs of Noel Coward (1899-1973), who does much the same thing.
He began playing piano when he was eight. He had a vigorous, percussive style and he knew his way around a keyboard. For proof, visit the song “(Oh, My Darling) Clementine” (traditional, with 1884 lyrics attributed to Percy Montrose [fl. 1880s]) in which he plays that chestnut in the styles of Cole Porter, Mozart (1756-1791), bebop jazz (flourished, 1945-1955), and Gilbert and Sullivan. Note in particular how well he understands the bebop style.
His lyrics too, regardless of the subject, are skillfully crafted. I learned more about writing song lyrics from Lehrer’s songs than from any other place. They set a high standard; they fit their melodies, they move along smoothly, they suit their subjects perfectly, and they are funny.
The songs he wrote for The Electric Company are practically a textbook in lyric writing, for example in his demonstration of “Silent E:”
Who can turn a cap into a cape?
Who can turn a tap into a tape?
A little glob becomes a globe
instantly,
If you just add Silent E.
He turned a dam – Alikazam! – into a
dame
But my friend Sam stayed just the
same.
(In “Tomfoolery” he added:
Once I had to hop, now I can hope,
And of course my pop is now the
Pope.)
A second answer to the question about the ultimate value of his work is that by his approach Lehrer calls into question the comfortable, comforting nature of earlier songs and, by implication, of earlier social conditions.
Some of his songs directly challenge staples of Fifties life – Christmas (“A Christmas Carol”), segregation (“I Wanna Go Back to Dixie”), nuclear armament (“We All Will Go Together When We Go”). Others simply raise a little hell.
In effect, then, his music is an event on the way to the consequential change that begins to flower in the 1960s. Just by their disruptive nature, the songs helped set the stage for attitudes of rebellion that are now commonplace.
I don’t know if he thought so; usually he talks about his songs as pure entertainment. Very little in entertainment is pure, though, and his songs provided an alternative way of looking at a lot of things for people like me, huddled around a record player in the Fifties.
Lehrer has said that his aim with his songs was not to change anyone’s mind, since anyone who heard him perform agreed with him already. He just “titillated the audience,” he said.
Two comments, again, on this way of thinking: it leaves out the effect of his work on people like me who heard it for the first time, and it ignores the way that art can change perceptions not as much by what it says as about how it says it.
When he turned his songwriting attention to political affairs, writing for That Was the Week that Was, he demonstrated that at a minimum he could raise awareness:
If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must
beware,
Don’t drink the water and don’t
breathe the air.
A common misconception about Lehrer is that he hated performing. He didn’t, as long as the performing was for a purpose. He wanted people to hear his songs, and as he pointed out, after a while everyone at Harvard had heard them “ad nauseam,” so he began to perform them more widely, also, in the process, polishing them so they were ready for recording, another way of getting people to hear them.
But he didn’t see the point of performing for people who already knew his music. He accepted some tour dates in Europe because he wanted to see Scandinavia, but once his fundamental purpose had been met – to introduce his music to people – he mostly stopped performing.
A similar misconception is that he stopped writing songs. He didn’t; he has said in interviews that he continued writing occasional pieces, including verses for friends. In the Remains collection are four songs that were written after the original six albums.
A YouTube video provides several examples, as well as a cheerful look at the man himself.
But it’s true that 1965 saw his final original album release. Why no more? He has said it’s because he had nothing else to say, but I would guess there’s more involved. David Byrne (b. 1952), formerly the lead singer of Talking Heads and a remarkable artist, gives a clue in his book How Music Works (Three Rivers Press, 2012/2017). Byrne writes that
context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed. . . . We unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit pre-existing formats. Of course, passion can still be present. Just because the form that one’s work will take is predetermined and opportunistic (meaning one makes something because the opportunity is there), it doesn’t mean that creation must be cold, mechanical, and heartless. Dark and emotional materials usually find a way in . . . . Opportunity and availability are often the mother of invention.
Lehrer’s performance career illustrates Lynch’s point clearly. The musical culture in the early 1950s, and society at large at that time, provided the context for many of his songs. That culture and that society changed, and with it the “formats” he had drawn on for his songs changed as well. The material for his music was no longer there.
Mathematics, he said, provided a continuing way of looking at the world, it was his first interest, and he enjoyed spending his time there. He continued to listen to music, or try to. I am happy to report that he admired the Beatles.
Wikipedia’s article on Lehrer reports a wonderful episode in his later years:
In 2012, rapper 2 Chainz sampled Lehrer's song “The Old Dope Peddler“ on his debut album, Based on a T.R.U. Story. In 2013, Lehrer said he was “very proud” to have his song sampled “literally sixty years after I recorded it”. Lehrer went on to describe his official response to the request to use his song: “As sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?”
“Fun” is a word he often uses, and we see why. It’s an interesting choice of a word for a man who purported to believe that people mess up just about everything they touch, but he made his own place in that world and wasn’t obsessed with what others did, mostly using it as material for comedy.
What is Lehrer’s rank among American composers? High, I think, because of his lyrical and melodic skill and his unstoppable sense of humor. There are things, we should note, that he does not attempt. For example, there are no love songs in his work, and remarkably little about sex. “I Got It From Agnes” is about as close as that gets, and only inferentially:
She then gave it to Daniel,
Whose spaniel has it now.
Our dentist even got it,
And we’re still wondering how.
Lehrer cast a cold eye on romance, patriotism, religion, many things that we hold dear or claim to. That’s what comedians do – they disrupt our pretentions. When armed with weapons of music and lyrics, they are all the more potent. Thanks to Tom Lehrer for keeping us alert, and for helping us to laugh.
And we mustn’t forget the song about the Boy Scouts, which got Lehrer in a bit of trouble during a tour to Australia in 1960:
Be prepared!
That's the Boy Scouts' solemn creed
Be prepared!
And be clean in word and deed
Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice
Unless you get a good percentage of her price
Be prepared!
And be careful not to do your good deeds
When there's no one watching you
If you're looking for adventure of a new and
different kind
And you come across a Girl Scout who is
similarly inclined
Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be
scared
Be prepared!
* *
* *
“TOM LEHRER, 97,
SATIRIST WHOSE
by Richard Severo and
Peter Keepnews
[Above, I embedded a link to an obituary of Tom Lehrer in Kirk Woodward’s profile of the comic songwriter. I used the notice from Variety, the renowned daily entertainment newspaper, because I think coverage if Lehrer’s death in a show business publication would be apt. Since, however, Kirk specifically mentions the New York Times obit further down in his article, and the notice is particularly comprehensive, I decided to run it following Kirk’s report.
[The obituary notice below appeared in the Times on 28 July 2025, in the front section. It was also posted as “Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97” on the New York Times website on 27 July and updated on 7 August. (Richard Severo, a New York Times reporter from 1968 to 2006 and cowrote the Lehrer death notice, died in 2023, two years before his subject. I’m sure ROTters know how and why this happens in the newspaper business, but if anyone doesn’t, check out “An Obituary Written From Beyond the Grave? Not Quite.”)]
A mathematician by training, he acquired a devoted following with songs that set sardonic lyrics to music that was often maddeningly cheerful.
Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.
Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. Accompanying himself on piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert and on records that his admirers purchased, originally by mail order only, in the hundreds of thousands.
But his entertainment career ultimately took a back seat to academia. In his heart he never quit his day job; he just took a few sabbaticals.
He stopped performing in 1960 after only a few years, resumed briefly in 1965 and then stopped for good in 1967. His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.
As popular as his songs were, Mr. Lehrer never felt entirely comfortable performing them. “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”
Mr. Lehrer’s songwriting output was modest, but it was darkly memorable. In the tasteless world he evoked, a seemingly harmless geezer turned out to be “The Old Dope Peddler” and spring was the time for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”
In “The Masochism Tango,” which the sheet music instructed should be played “painstakingly,” he warbled, “You can raise welts/Like nobody else.” In “Be Prepared,” his “Boy Scout marching song,” he admonished, “Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice/Unless you get a good percentage of her price.”
Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1928, one of two sons of James Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Anna (Waller) Lehrer. Young Tom was precocious, but his precocity had its limits. He took piano lessons from an early age, but balked at learning classical music and insisted on switching to a teacher who emphasized the Broadway show tunes he loved.
He also developed a fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan; one of his early songs, “The Elements,” was a list of the chemical elements set to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from “The Pirates of Penzance.” (Years later “The Elements” would be performed by the young scientist played by Jim Parsons on the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”) [Actor Daniel Radcliffe also sang the song on TV in 2010; here’s a video of the performance.]
After graduating early from the Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut, Mr. Lehrer went to Harvard, where he majored in mathematics and received his bachelor’s degree in 1946, at 18. He earned a master’s from Harvard the next year and then pursued doctoral studies there and at Columbia University. (He continued his studies on and off for many years, but he never completed his Ph.D. thesis.)
While at Harvard, Mr. Lehrer began to write songs for his own amusement and that of his fellow students. He told his friends that the songs simply came to him and that he wrote them down in just about the time it took him to brush his teeth, but they quickly found an audience on campus. One of his earliest efforts, written in 1945, was a parody of football songs called “Fight Fiercely, Harvard,” in which he exhorted:
Fight,
fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.
How we shall celebrate our victory?
We shall invite the whole team up for tea!
In 1952, as he looked forward to becoming a researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, N.M., he wrote “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be,” whose lyrics suggested that he was not to have a fruitful career in atomic research: “’Mid the yuccas and the thistles/I’ll watch the guided missiles/While the old F.B.I. watches me.”
By that time Mr. Lehrer had begun performing his songs in Cambridge, Mass. He did not want to abandon research and teaching, but he saw the possibility of combining the contemplative life with an entertainment career.
In 1953, encouraged by friends, he produced an album. To his surprise, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” cut and pressed in an initial run of 400 copies, was a hit. Sold through the mail and initially promoted almost entirely by word of mouth, it ultimately sold an estimated half-million copies.
The cover contained a drawing of Mr. Lehrer seated at the piano, with horns coming out of his head and a devil’s tail emerging from his formal attire. (His follow-up album, “More of Tom Lehrer,” used the same image.) The 11 songs lived up to that image, among them “My Home Town” (where the “just plain folks” included the pyromaniacal son of the mayor and the math teacher who sells dirty pictures to children after school) and the necrophiliac ballad “I Hold Your Hand in Mine.”
The record’s success led to nightclub engagements in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. His performing career was interrupted by a two-year Army hitch [1955-57]; when he returned to civilian life in 1957 he hit the road again, giving concerts in Canada and overseas as well as in the United States.
In 1959, in an unusual move, he simultaneously released a new studio album, “More of Tom Lehrer,” and a live album, “An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer,” which contained concert versions of the same songs. (He later also rerecorded the songs from his first album in concert.) But after another year of touring, he stopped performing and returned to the Harvard faculty.
In 1964 and 1965 he wrote several songs for “That Was the Week That Was,” the short-lived satirical NBC television series [1963-65]. He did not appear on the show, but he did return to the road for a while, recording his new songs at the hungry i in San Francisco for the 1965 album “That Was the Year That Was” — not a do-it-yourself effort this time, but released on Reprise, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Records.
His new numbers, in which he focused on political and social issues, included “A Song for World War III” (“So long, Mom/I’m off to drop the bomb”), which was sung on “That Was the Week That Was” by Steve Allen [1921-2000; television and radio personality, comedian, musician, composer, writer, and actor; in 1954 became the first host of The Tonight Show, the first late-night television talk show], and “Wernher von Braun,” about the German scientist [1912-77] who designed weapons for the Nazis and later worked for NASA: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
The album also contained what may have been the most controversial song Mr. Lehrer ever wrote: “The Vatican Rag,” his response to the Second Vatican Council’s [1962-65] attempt to, in his words, “make the church more commercial.” The lyrics begin:
First
you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!
The song was condemned by clergymen and school administrators. When Channel 13 [WNDT until 1970, when it became WNET], the New York public television station, played it as part of a [1967] fund-raising drive, the station received hundreds of calls and letters of protest.
Mr. Lehrer gave up performing again after a concert in Copenhagen in September 1967. This time he stuck to his decision. The rest was almost, but not quite, silence.
His last sustained burst of songwriting came in 1971, when he contributed “Silent E” and other educational ditties to the PBS children’s series “The Electric Company.” The next year he performed at a rally for the presidential campaign of Senator George S. McGovern , [1922-2012; politician, diplomat, and historian; served as a representative (1957-61) and three-term senator from South Dakota (1963-81), and was the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election]. But there were no more nightclub or concert performances, and no more albums.
By 1981 he had fallen so far off the cultural radar that, he told The Harvard Crimson, some people thought he was dead. (“I was hoping the rumors would cut down on the junk mail,” he said.)
A new generation was introduced to the Lehrer songbook in 1980 when the British impresario Cameron Mackintosh [b. 1946] presented “Tomfoolery,” a revue of his songs, in London. The show was a hit there and was later produced in New York [Village Gate (Off-Broadway), 1981-82], Washington [Kreeger Theatre (Arena Stage), 1982], Dublin [Gates Theatre, 1981] and elsewhere.
With characteristic self-deprecation, Mr. Lehrer attributed the show’s success to a shortage of new songwriters. “It was inevitable,” he said, “that someone would peer into the almost empty barrel and notice me down there.”
When “Tomfoolery” played at the Village Gate in New York in 1981, Mr. Lehrer explained to The Times why he had stopped writing. “The Vietnam War is what changed it,” he said. “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.” On another occasion he famously offered another explanation: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger [1923-2023; German-born diplomat and political scientist; United States Secretary of State: 1973-77 and National Security Advisor: 1969-75 under presidents Richard Nixon (1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74) and Gerald Ford (1913-2006; 38th President of the United States: 1974-77)] was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize” [1977].
In October 2020, Mr. Lehrer announced on his website that “all the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else” — in other words, that he was relinquishing the rights to all his songs, except for the melodies of those few that used his words but someone else’s music.
He expanded on, and formalized, this announcement two years later, stating among other things that “permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.” Adding that he planned to shut down his website “in the not too distant future,” he concluded: “In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.” (His website, and the notice, were still online at his death [and still yet at this posting].)
It was a highly unusual move, Abby North, the chief executive of a music rights management company [North Music Group], told the public radio show “Marketplace” [airs on many public radio stations during the last segment of the NPR program Morning Edition], because for many songwriters, royalties “have been sustaining multiple families for multiple generations.”
Mr. Lehrer divided his time for many years between Cambridge, where he taught at both Harvard and M.I.T., and Santa Cruz, where he taught courses on mathematics and musical theater at the University of California from 1972 to 2001.
When a fan once asked Mr. Lehrer if he had ever married or had children, he replied, “Not guilty on both counts.” He leaves no immediate survivors.
Reflecting on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at which time I will of course move to California full time.”
[If I had to pick a favorite Tom Lehrer song, it’d be a hard assignment. “Be Prepared” tickles me endlessly—I was a Boy Scout before I was in high school, though I doubt that’s why the song gets me—and “The Vatican Rag” makes me laugh—maybe because I’m not Catholic.
[But if I were forced to make a choice, sort of like Stephen Colbert’s question on his “Colbert Questionert,” except restricted here to “You get one Tom Lehrer song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it?" As Colbert might explain, “It’s not that it’s playing in your head endlessly, or on a loop. It’s just that whenever you choose to listen to Lehrer’s music for the rest of your life, that’s the only song you’ll hear.”
[In that case, I’d have to choose “Alma” (1965). The only reason I can figure for that is that its references are so obscure—how many people recognize the names Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Walter Gropius (1883-1969), and Franz Werfel (1890-1945) off the tops of their heads? (Well, maybe Mahler--if you’re into classical music.)
[Then, the rhymes are sooo . . . I don’t know—surprising. A little forced, perhaps—pairing “Alma” with “embalma,” for example (though I love “Bauhaus” and “chow house”!)—but very chuckleworthy. It’s just not anything anyone—well, me, anyway—would imagine. Not even from Tom Lehrer.
[Just for my own amusement, then, here are the lyrics:
The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well
Once you picked her up on your antenna
You’d never be free of her spell
Her lovers were many and varied
From the day she began her beguine
There were three famous ones whom she married
And God knows how many between
Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
Which of your magical wands
Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?
The first one she married was Mahler
Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav
And each time he saw her he’d holler
“Ach, dot is de fräulein I must have”
Their marriage, however, was murder
He’d scream to the heavens above
“I’m writing ‘Das Lied von der Erde’
Und she only wants to make love”
Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
You should have a statue in bronze
For bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz
While married to Gus, she met Gropius
And soon she was swinging with Walter
Gus died, and her tear drops were copious
She cried all the way to the altar
But he would work late at the Bauhaus
And only came home now and then
She said, “What am I running, a chow house?
It’s time to change partners again”
Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
Though you didn’t even use Ponds
You got Gustav and Walter and Franz
While married to Walt she’d met Werfel
And he too was caught in her net
He married her, but he was carefell
’Cause Alma was no Bernadette
And that is the story of Alma
Who knew how to receive and to give
The body that reached her embalma
Was one that had known how to live
Alma, tell us
How can they help being jealous?
Ducks always envy the swans
Who get Gustav and Walter
You never did falter
With Gustav and Walter and Franz
[Just for the record, Alma Mahler-Werfel was born Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler (1879, in Vienna – 1964, in New York City). She was married to composer Gustav Mahler from 1902 to 1911, architect Walter Gropius from 1915 to 1920, and novelist and playwright Franz Werfel from 1929 to 1945.
[Richard Severo was a science journalist who wrote for the New York Times from 1968 to 2006. During that time, he won a George Polk Award from Long Island University in 1975, as well as a Meyer “Mike” Berger Award from the Columbia School of Journalism.
[Peter Keepnews, formerly of the New York Post, Soho Weekly News, and Jazz Magazine, is a veteran music journalist and an editor at the Times.
[Alex Traub contributed
reporting.]
