Tom Lehrer – An Appreciation
(Note: This piece was adapted from an article that first appeared in the Sacramento Bee in May 2000.)
Tom Lehrer, one of the most significant social satirists of our generation, died over the past weekend at the age of 97.
(Tom Lehrer made the lyrics and recordings of his songs available for free on this website.)
(Click here for our earlier piece on the need for a Tom Lehrer today.)
Born in New York City, Lehrer started writing clever and acerbic songs when he was an undergraduate at Harvard in the mid-1940s. He kept up his songwriting avocation while doing graduate work at both Harvard and Columbia (yet never completed a Ph.D.). He wrote enough material to record a dozen songs in 1953, which he released on his own label as a 10-inch LP. He followed that six years later with another self-released album of 11 songs.
The humor in Lehrer’s songs from the 1950s came in three basic types. First there were his hilariously macabre ditties – sort of the musical counterparts to Charles Addams or Gahan Wilson cartoons. These were on the order of the self-explanatory “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” the endorsement of cannibalism espoused in “The Irish Ballad” and the all-too-literal “I Hold Your Hand In Mine” and “The Masochism Tango.”
Then there were the songs that used satire to throw light on serious issues. Here, Lehrer’s progressive politics came into play, in songs about atomic warfare (“The Wild West is Where I Want to Be” and “We Will All Go Together When We Go” or racial segregation and Jim Crow laws in “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,” first recorded in the early 1950s.
Less obviously political but no less rebellious was the manner in which Lehrer satirically punctured the self-satisfaction and complacency of 1950s America. He did it by skewering what politicians now call “traditional values.” The over-the-top humor in “My Home Town,” for instance, revealed that just beneath the surface of the pious and the pure lay potential serial killers, pimps and prostitutes, pornographers and drug pushers.
Lehrer’s music was often a take-off on familiar sentimental tunes, with sugary fluff like “The Old Lamplighter” becoming in Lehrer’s brain a paean to “The Old Dope Peddler.” The usual romantic conventions were turned on their heads in “She’s My Girl,” done in the manner of a sardonic torch song. “A Christmas Carol” tossed a few barbs at the vulgar commercialization of the holiday. Lehrer even made fun of the sacrosanct trinity of motherhood (“Oedipus Rex”), the Boy Scouts (“Be Prepared”) and patriotism (“It Makes a Fellow Proud To Be a Soldier”).
In the early 1960s, Lehrer managed to bring out a few additional albums – of previously recorded material – through the clever use of re-released versions of songs in live performances (which featured hilarious introductions to his songs by Lehrer) or with full orchestral arrangements. He still devoted most of his time to teaching college math.
But in 1964, Lehrer became active again, writing a bunch of new topical songs for the short-lived NBC-TV show “That Was the Week That Was.” Yet the show’s producers were too timid to perform his more politically charged or shocking material, and he didn’t get to sing his songs, anyway; the show’s regulars did all the singing.
However, Lehrer booked an engagement in early 1965 at the hungry i, a popular San Francisco nightclub. These shows were recorded and released on an album called “That Was the Year That Was.” Lehrer emerged from his Cambridge cocoon, where he was still teaching math at Harvard and MIT, to perform and promote his new album more than he had ever done before with his records. He even appeared twice on “The Tonight Show.”
Lehrer’s new topical songs struck a nerve on college campuses and other bastions of liberalism, where his progressive politics clicked with many who had been supporters of the civil rights and “Ban the Bomb” movements and among the emerging movement protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “Send the Marines,” written at the time when the U.S. was escalating the War in Vietnam and intervening militarily in the Dominican Republic, satirized U.S. militarism. It noted the eagerness with which American presidents were willing to send troops overseas in support of supposed national interests in contrast to their reluctance to use troops to uphold the law of the land in Mississippi.
Lehrer also sang about the dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons (“Who’s Next?”) and the folly of nuclear warfare (“So Long, Mom – A Song For World War III”). He went after both prejudice and phoniness in “National Brotherhood Week.” He made fun of California voters for electing a lightweight actor (no, not Ronald Reagan) to the U.S. Senate in the song “George Murphy” (“Isn’t it great/At last we’ve got a senator who can really sing and dance.”) And he gave the world “Pollution,” one of the first satirical songs about the destruction of the environment, which included the immortal line, “The breakfast garbage that you throw into the Bay/They drink at lunch in San Jose.”
He even took on the Roman Catholic Church in a (gently) satiric number entitled “The Vatican Rag,” which became one of his most controversial songs. (I once played this song for my friend Father Daniel Berrigan, the radical Catholic priest who went to prison for destroying draft files during the Vietnam War. Father Dan, who had not heard the song before, doubled over with laughter, particularly over the “genuflect, genuflect, genuflect” line.)
Lehrer, never a very active live performer before, gave up performing and recording almost entirely in 1967. In the early ‘70s, he began teaching mathematics for half a year at the University of California, Santa Cruz, spending the other part of each year in Cambridge. (My former wife, Lorna Hall, actually took Lehrer’s class at UCSC, “Mathematics for Non-Mathematicians,” and described him as friendly but serious, hardly a joke-cracker.)
Lehrer wrote and recorded a few songs for the PBS children’s show “The Electric Company.” A musical revue of his songs, called “Tomfoolery,” featuring a small group of singers, was staged by the soon-to-be-famous (for “Cats”) London producer Cameron MacIntosh in 1980, and it found moderate success in London and in several U.S. cities. And he recorded a few songs in 1999 for inclusion in a boxed set of his music. But that’s it.
Why were Tom Lehrer’s songs enjoyed by generation after generation, and why was this self-deprecating, semi-serious (about his career, anyway) songwriter so great?
Using humor to attack serious issues, Lehrer was able to appeal to audiences beyond what more dour, more earnest singers might reach. His most popular album, “That Was the Year That Was,” managed to climb to No. 18 on the Billboard pop chart in December 1965, a time when the charts were dominated by the Beatles, the Supremes, the Rolling Stones and Simon and Garfunkel – strange company for a mathematics lecturer from Cambridge.
Jokes were often made about Lehrer’s singing voice – charitably, one could say that he managed to carry a tune - but he actually possessed a marvelously expressive comic vocal style. He moved easily from hammy to deadpan, from smug to salacious – you could really hear the leer.
And his ultra-expressive piano playing provided a perfect accompaniment to his singing, as he romped and bounced through faux show tunes, rags, tangos, music hall melodies, folk songs and ballads. Virtually all of his tunes were familiar-sounding. In only a few cases did he lift an entire melody from another composer – his Chemistry 101 song, “The Elements,” samples (to use present-day parlance) the music of Arthur Sullivan’s “Model of a Modern Major General” from “The Pirates of Penzance.”
But Lehrer’s ultimate gift was his ability to come up with incredible rhymes and hilarious word play. Here’s a sampler:
“When they see us coming, the birdies will try an’ hide/But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide” – “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”
“This is what they said on/the road to Armageddon/So long, Mom/”I’m off to drop the bomb/So don’t wait up for me” – “So Long Mom – A Song for World War III.”
“Do whatever steps you want if/You have cleared them with the Pontiff” – “The Vatican Rag”
“Be nice to people who/Are inferior to you/It’s only for a week, so have no fear/Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.” – “National Brotherhood Week.
“See the halibuts and the sturgeons/Being wiped out by detergeons/Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly/But they don’t last long if they try.” – “Pollution”
For making people laugh and think at the same time, Tom Lehrer was nothing short of a national treasure – though there’s no doubt he would have called it just fool’s gold.
Bruce Dancis spent 18 years as the Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Sacramento Bee, where he also wrote a syndicated column about DVDs. During a long career in journalism, he served as an editor at the Daily Californian, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Socialist Review, Mother Jones, M.I. (Musicians’ Industry) Magazine and the Oakland Tribune. He also wrote about politics, history, movies and rock music for these publications, as well as for Rolling Stone’s Record, In These Times, Guitar Player, Keyboard, the East Bay Voice and San Francisco magazine. In the late ‘60s, he was the editor of the SDS-affiliated magazine, The First Issue. He is the author of “Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War” (2014, Cornell University Press) and appears in the documentary film “The Boys Who Said No! Draft Resistance and the Vietnam War” (2020). He lives in Cardiff, CA, and Putnam Valley, NY.