Tom Lehrer, 1928-2025
The mathematician best known for his satirical songs is gone at 97.
New York Times, “Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97“
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.”
[…]
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.)
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.)
[…]
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.)
What’s remarkable is that, while his public career ended before my second birthday, I’ve somehow always knew who he was. My parents almost certainly didn’t own any of his albums. Presumably, I’ve seen a lot of black-and-white clips of his performances over the years and somehow got the impression he was active much longer than he was.
It’s also quite interesting that, despite failure to complete his doctoral work, he enjoyed a long career teaching mathematics at Harvard, MIT, and (mostly) the University of California, Santa Cruz.
My parents were big fans, and we heard their records a lot growing up. I also loved his contribution to The Electric Company of my youth.
@Moosebreath: I used to watch the Electric Company as a small child, and it’s apparently how I learned to read by age 4. I have no direct memories of any of the live-action parts (which featured some current and future stars, including Morgan Freeman and Andrea Martin, among others), but I do remember a few of the cartoons. Who wrote the “T-I-O-N shun shun shun shun” song? ChatGPT says it’s Lehrer.
@Kylopod:
Also the Silent-E (“who can turn a man into a mane?”) and L-Y ones.
James, ummmh headline?
@gVOR10: Weird typo. Fixed.
I know little of his work, but I know this one:
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department, ” says Wernher von Braun.
@Kathy: One of my favorites is “National Brotherhood Week,” which features the following lyrics:
Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIlJ8ZCs4jY
@Moosebreath:
That’s rather interesting, because my memories of both the show and my learning to read is spotty. I don’t remember the ones you mention. Keep in mind that this was around the late ’70s to early ’80s (the show ended in 1977, the year I was born, but was in syndication for years afterward). I always perceived that the way I learned was when I picked up a book on my parents’ shelf and started reading it when I was 4. The book was from a series called Ladybird Sunstart, designed to teach kids to read. I knew that’s what it was when I picked it up. How did I know? I can’t remember–maybe one of my parents told me, but there’s a real possibility I knew because I read and understood the words on the cover.
In any case, I soon showed my parents what I was doing, and I remember some of the mistakes I was making. I thought the word spelled S-H-E was “shhhhh”–as in “be quiet.” One of my parents corrected me on that. But it’s apparent that I was simply applying skills I’d already acquired. I knew the alphabet, I knew what sound came from putting an S together with an H, and I knew that an E at the end was usually silent, even though I don’t directly remember the Electric Company song you mentioned about silent-E.
I also remember a cartoon called “When You’ve Lost Your L,” but looking it up last night, that one was apparently from Sesame Street–a show that focused more on teaching letters than any broader reading skills, but for all I know it was a contributing factor to my knowledge of the alphabet before starting grade school. Still, the Electric Company was the main source of my skills. And it wasn’t until the news of Lehrer’s death yesterday that I found out he wrote for the Electric Company, and realized he may have been partially responsible for my early acquisition of those skills.
Maybe TV doesn’t always rot kids’ brains.
@Moosebreath: Mine as well and had most of his records that they, or later I, played often. Still randomly burst out with “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” each spring. After all, spring is the loveliest time of the year…
I sat in on one day of his math class at UCSC in the early ‘90s, wherein he used flawed reasoning to prove that 1=2 and that he was God. It is a lifetime regret of mine that I didn’t take the class.
@Ol’ Nat:
I remember an anecdote in my calc textbook about a theologian from the 17th or 18th century who produced a mathematic proof that 0 = 1, and he thought this was evidence of the existence of God. His error was that he was using rules for calculating finite numbers that didn’t apply to infinite sequences, which only became fully understood with the development of calculus. Here’s the proof, from my memory.
0 = 0
0 = 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + [and on infinitely]
Since 0 = (1 + -1), that means he could replace all the zeroes in the sequence, getting:
0 = (1 + -1) + (1 + -1) + (1 + -1) + (1 + -1) + (1 + -1) + (1 + -1) + [and on infinitely]
Using the commutative property, he changed the placement of the parentheses, getting:
0 = 1 + (-1 + 1) + (-1 + 1) +(-1 + 1) +(-1 + 1) +(-1 + 1) + [and on infinitely]
Now, he crossed out every (-1 + 1) because they all equal zero, and once he does that, he’s left with the initial 1 at the start of the sequence. Hence, 0 = 1. QED.
Oh man, that sucks. I listen to his entire catalog a couple times a year just for a fun afternoon. What a legend.
@Ol’ Nat:
My junior high school physics teacher liked to take a commonly held true belief, and ask his students to prove it. Meantime he took up the contrary position. He had my class prove the Earth revolves around the Sun.
By the next day, some were uncertain whether this was true….
@Kylopod:..Maybe TV doesn’t always rot kids’ brains.
When I was very young, years before there were TV programs like Sesame Street and others aimed at teaching kids how to read, my dad would read me the color comic strips from the Sunday newspaper. Dagwood and Blondie, Nancy, Dixie Dugan, Moon Mullins (No doubt this comic inspired me to drive the Carbondale Yellow Cab when I was allegedly in college.) He wouldn’t read me Dick Tracy or Flash Gordon. He said that they were too violent. When he put the paper down and walked into the kitchen I would try to figure out what the words were in those two strips. If he saw me trying to read those “violent” comics he never stopped me. I think he was on to something.
@Kathy: That’s a great teaching moment. In some sense, the Sun does revolve around the Earth. It’s just that the orbit is much smaller, given the differences in masses. Also, it’s a legitimate frame of reference, if not that easy to calculate in.
Of course, this is why Galileo had such a hard time. He didn’t even have Newton’s Theory of Gravity at the time.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Any two body system revolves around the common center of gravity of the system. In the Earth-Moon system, said center is some distance inside the Earth. Both Moon and Earth revolve around this point, independent of their respective rotation.
In the case of the Sun-Earth system, the mass disparity is far greater but so is the distance. I forget exactly, but it’s some distance off the Sun’s center.
Now, one can isolate the Earth-Moon system for major practical effects, but Jupiter has a lot more influence than the rest of the planets combined. So in actual fact the Earth, Sun, and all the planets and asteroids, revolve a round the center of gravity of the Solar System, usually called the barycenter (presumably from the Greek word for weight). It gets really complicated and far above my level of interest. I seem to recall said center moves around a lot, given that the planets just won’t sit still.
But for purposes of making up the calendar, keeping track of the seasons, etc., the Earth revolves around the Sun is sufficient.
It’s funny. I remember seeing a bit of Tom Lehrer on things like the Ed Sullivan Show and so forth.
And then in grad school, some friends were fans and had records, and I really got into them and enjoyed them.
I have a whole lot of that stuff. Maybe “the complete works” or something like that.
Somehow, it isn’t as interesting to me now. I couldn’t say why.
Still, he gave me many hours of enjoyment and entertainment. Also a few choice quotes, such as “How does sixty-four come into it, I hear you say”
Maybe it’s the same reason as why I never watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail any more. I have the whole thing memorized, there’s really no point to watching it.
This applies to The Princess Bride as well.
I knew him from Dr. Demento.
(And from “The Electric Company”, but I didn’t realize it until I was an adult.)
I’ve known pretty much every Tom Lehrer song by memory for decades now. Genius on so many levels, and you have to be an academic mathematician to get all the jokes in “Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevkski”. And yet, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie”… RIP Dr. Genius.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Dr. Demento just retired, btw.
@Steven L. Taylor: It’s a good possibility that’s where I was first exposed to him. Although I’m sure I’ve seen some of the old videos, too.