Remember Tom Lehrer?
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All on Mon Jul 28 09:25:49 2025
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 Alma (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.”)
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; 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. 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, and “Wernher von Braun,” about the German scientist 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 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, the New York public television station, played it as part of
a 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. 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.)
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