Tom Lehrer, American Cassandra

Our smartest comedic cynic dies at 97

Tom Lehrer

It’s easy to be a doomsayer when the walls of civilization start crumbling, but issuing dire warnings before anyone has even noticed cracks forming is a much more difficult trick, one that takes foresight and confidence. Sounding the alarm bells via sophisticated rhymes set to unforgettable melodies? Endowing the resulting music with unmatched wit? Well, that took comedian Tom Lehrer, who died on July 26 at 97 years old.

“Always predict the worst, and you’ll be hailed as a prophet,” said Lehrer, who was ultimately less of a Moses than a Cassandra, his cautions largely ignored even while the audience for his comedy grew throughout the Eisenhower years at the dawn of what was supposed to be the American century. While the nation celebrated the rise of the United States as a superpower defending liberty and democracy across the globe, Lehrer sensed a national lack of moral integrity and foretold disasters large and small: enduring racism, a feckless government, a failed higher education system and a complacent citizenry.

“I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.”

The son of a tie manufacturer, Lehrer was born in 1928 into a comfortable Upper Manhattan life. He attended good schools, took piano lessons, delighted in Broadway musicals and worked at a summer camp where one of his charges was a young Stephen Sondheim. His family was Jewish, but the home was secular. His upbringing had “more to do with the delicatessen than the synagogue,” Lehrer recalled in liner notes accompanying the CD box set The Remains of Tom Lehrer, released by Rhino Records in 2000. “My brother and I did go to Sunday school, but we had Christmas trees, and ‘God’ was primarily an expletive, usually preceded by ‘oh’ or ‘my’ or both.” 

A bit too young to join the war effort against Hitler, Lehrer was a gifted student who skipped two grades in high school and in 1946 matriculated to Harvard at the age of 16 because so many other young men were fighting overseas. He intended to study either chemistry or literature, but another department required fewer courses: mathematics. This became both his major and, eventually, his passion.

After graduating magna cum laude in 1946, Lehrer obtained his MA in math the following year and remained at Harvard in a PhD program until 1953. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955. Because of his analytic training, he was assigned to military intelligence, working for the NSA well before its very existence was public knowledge. Although the war had ended, Lehrer did manage to contribute while in uniform. Regulations explicitly disallowed liquid alcohol on base, so Lehrer—perhaps recalling his chemistry classes—initiated a state change, so to speak, by mixing vodka with gelatin and inventing the Jell-O shot. (Orange, he determined, was the best flavor.) If only subsequent generations of frat partygoers could be made to understand the debt of gratitude they owe to a long-forgotten Jewish singing comedian.

After he left the military, Lehrer returned to Cambridge to resume his graduate studies, supporting himself by teaching occasional classes not only at Harvard, but also at MIT and Wellesley. The academic lifestyle suited him, but he knew that he didn’t want to become a full-time faculty member, so he slow-played work on his doctorate. Like Zeno’s Achilles chasing a tortoise, he kept advancing, semester after semester, but never passed.

All research and no fun would have made Tom a dull boy, though, so Lehrer spent his off-hours writing novelty songs that spoofed musical styles from around the globe with a sardonic sensibility and a thorough mastery of language. His music was such a huge hit at parties and at local pubs around Cambridge that Lehrer thought he might be good enough to sign with a label, but his lyrics were too radical for conservative record company executives. Undaunted, he rented an hour of studio time in Boston, laid down the tracks for Songs by Tom Lehrer, had four hundred copies pressed, and arranged to have them sold at the university bookstore and local record shops.

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The album’s most remembered song might be “Lobachevsky,” a comedic tribute to a Russian mathematician in which Lehrer extols the virtues of plagiarism. His friend, Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas Hofstadter, believed Lehrer took the tune’s advice. “I said his songs were really beautiful, they were extraordinarily catchy, and they had a pungency, a kind of a sharpness that was unique, and he denied it completely. He said, ‘My songs are all derivative. Everything I do is derivative.’” Indeed, in a recorded concert years later, Lehrer revealed that the idea for “Lobachevsky” was all but stolen from Danny Kaye.

Even if it was occasionally derivative, Lehrer’s music was also masterful. His lyrical craftsmanship—lampooning universities, atomic weapons, love and especially the Norman Rockwell-esque picture that 1950s America was trying to sell—was dazzling. In “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,” for example, he satirized the Jim Crow South by assuming the persona of a racist who “eats cornpone till it comes out of my ears.”

I wanna go back to Dixie
I wanna be a Dixie pixie

I wanna talk with Southern gentlemen,
And put my white sheet on again

From his first song to his last, Lehrer’s dark humor heaped derision on all things precious. He knew that behind the pleasant mask it wore, the world was sick, and he was determined to reveal the cancers he had diagnosed.

By the 1960s, edgy comedy that took the United States to task became run-of-the-mill. Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory were among the first to whip out their razors, and others soon followed: Richard Pryor, George Carlin and eventually both Bill Hicks and Lewis Black, to name just a few. Preceding them all, however, when contemporary humor consisted almost entirely of Borscht Belt one-liners about mothers-in-law, Lehrer blazed a snarky trail.

“He’s one of the great American songwriters without a doubt, right up there with everybody, the top guys,” Oscar-winning composer Randy Newman said on a 2013 BBC radio program. “As a lyricist, as good as there’s been in the last half of the 20th century.” 

Lehrer’s raillery—part highbrow, part gutter, delivered with a deadpan smirk—made him a sensation among the members of the Cambridge academic set. “We had a common musician friend, Arthur Berger,” recalls linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky, “And I sometimes heard Lehrer perform live for a small group at Arthur’s home.” 

Peter Achinstein, the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins, remembers Lehrer wowing an even bigger crowd. “There was a freshman year bash at which he performed in the biggest auditorium at Harvard,” Achinstein says. “Everyone loved him. He was part of the 1950s intellectual and not-so-intellectual culture.”

In time, Songs by Tom Lehrer flew off the shelves of the campus bookstore and local record shops. Over the summer, as students dispersed around the country and played the record for their friends back home, orders started to trickle into a post office box Lehrer had the foresight to include on the back of his album cover.

“My songs spread slowly, like herpes,” Lehrer later joked, but when his music hit the airwaves on college and alternative stations in San Francisco, earning a write-up in The Chronicle, he suddenly got a wave of album orders from the West Coast, becoming a national underground sensation. His work was still too edgy to be commercial, so Lehrer started his own label to produce it. (He shared a small office in Boston with a local attorney named Michael Dukakis.) Defying the expectations of craven capitalists, Lehrer became a self-starting success story.

In 1959, he produced two more records, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer and More of Tom Lehrer, extending his virtuosity as a songwriter. In “The Elements,” for example, he set the periodic table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song.” His music retained its uniquely dark playfulness. No one else in the late 1950s could have composed “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” or “The Masochism Tango.” He also remained as critical as ever, penning an ode to selfish materialism (“A Christmas Carol”) and a catchy celebration of global thermonuclear annihilation:

And we will all bake together when we bake
There’ll be nobody present at the wake
With complete participation
In that grand incineration
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak

The development of atomic weapons had made the United States a superpower, but Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When We Go” made it clear that he considered the country far too stupid and shortsighted to handle the responsibility. Having worked for the Atomic Energy Commission at its Los Alamos facility, which he parodied in “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be,” Lehrer came by his distrust firsthand.

Having achieved national notoriety, Lehrer played split bills on national tours with Odetta and Peter, Paul, and Mary for a while. Eventually, though, he grew disenchanted. While he loved the intellectual challenge of carving his sarcastic sentiments into lyrics that paired precisely with memorable melodies—an almost-mathematical task akin to solving a multivariable equation—he found performing dull. The adulation he experienced on the road couldn’t hold a candle to the thrill of composing songs or of working on his long-neglected PhD thesis. In a move that defied everyone’s expectations, Lehrer left show business at the height of his fame to return to math…

…until 1964, when Lehrer discovered That Was the Week That Was, a comedic news program with the same kind of irreverence and intelligence that eventually gave rise to The Daily Show. The program sparked his imagination. He realized he had more to say, so he started writing again. His first target for satire was National Brotherhood Week, an ecumenical celebration of tolerance founded in 1927 and eventually discontinued in the early 2000s. The event’s forced faux moralism brought out Lehrer’s venom:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews

But during National Brotherhood Week
Its national everyone smile at one another-hood week,
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

Lehrer sent “National Brotherhood Week” to That Was the Week That Was, and the show’s producer loved it. The song appeared on the very next episode. Soon, he agreed to provide new material on the condition that he would never have to appear on the program, which only survived for one more season. After its cancellation, Lehrer recorded all the songs he wrote for the show, as well as those the producers rejected for being too provocative, and released a new album, That Was the Year That Was. He mocked religion with “The Vatican Rag,” militarism with “Send in the Marines,” and people who put profit before the planet with “Pollution.” His scathing musical wit was still in fine form.

Then, for the most part, that was the career that was. While Lehrer did still write new songs from time to time—“I’m Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica” was one memorable late-career hit in 1990—he generally kept a low profile in academia, splitting his time between the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he taught both math and musical theater, and his beloved Cambridge, MA. In 1980, British theatrical producer Cameron Mackintosh created Tomfoolery, a revue based on Lehrer’s work that enjoyed successful runs on the West End and Off-Broadway, but while Lehrer did consult on the show, he generally kept himself contentedly out of the spotlight.

In 2020, without warning or fanfare, Lehrer posted an astonishing notice on his website:

All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been permanently and irrevocably relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain. In other words, I have abandoned, surrendered and disclaimed all right, title and interest in and to my work and have injected any and all copyrights into the public domain.

His unprecedented act of generosity defied the culture of intellectual property that has long dominated the industrial entertainment complex in America. It also served as a very fitting end to his career. How else to attack capitalism one last time than by ensuring that his masterpieces of mockery held no more money-making power?

At the beginning of the American century, Lehrer told us all exactly how it would end, deriving its self-annihilation with delightful mathematical precision. Toward the end of his life, however, Lehrer no longer had the stomach to poke fun at disaster. “Things I once thought were funny are scary now,” he fretted. “I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.” If only we had heeded his warnings before it was too late. Now, as we grieve while the country we thought we lived in unravels around us, we also have to mourn our American Cassandra.

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