Tom Lehrer obituary: devilish musical satirist

Times

2 days ago

Before Tom Lehrer opened his mouth, he seemed the image of decency. Sitting at the piano in a tux as sharp as his jawline, looking a little nerdy with his slicked-back hair, large-framed glasses and bow tie, he could have fooled his listeners into thinking that they were about to hear a mild selection of show tunes. Yet as soon as his fingers hit the keys he revealed himself as the imp he really was, gleefully mocking staid mid-century morals, goading his listeners to clutch their pearls. He sang The Masochism Tango, exclaiming that 'I ache for the touch of your lips, dear/ But much more for the touch of your whips, dear.' And he sang about that bucolic way to spend a Sunday afternoon: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.
In I Got It From Agnes, he sang about the transmission of 'it', a venereal disease, through a series of increasingly depraved couplings. Masterfully avoiding recourse to a single rude word, he made eyes bulge with tell of how 'Max got it from Edith, who gets it every spring/ She got it from her daddy who just gives her everything/ She then gave it to Daniel, whose spaniel has it now/ Our dentist even got it and we're still wondering how.'
He won renown among those of discerning bad taste in the Fifties and early Sixties for 37 such songs. They also included I Hold Your Hand In Mine — the seemingly sweet murmurs of a lover who has in fact murdered his darling and kept her hand as a souvenir — and When You are Old and Gray, in which, inverting Yeats's poem, he pleaded: 'So say you love me here and now, I'll make the most of that/ Say you love and trust me, for I know you'll disgust me, when you're old and getting fat.'
He sang such lyrics with blithe zest and remarkable vocal dexterity, wending his way through the most tangled tongue-twisters. As if to prove a point, he arranged all the known elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Major General's Song. Part of the joy of listening to him sing was the thrill of hearing him vault such high hurdles as 'Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium/ And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium/ And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium/ And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.'
Lehrer was such a confident performer that his songs could seem like spontaneous outbursts, but really he laboured over them intently, shaving off spare words and notes until they were as elegant as equations. A Harvard mathematician who retreated from the limelight back to his alma mater, he found the same satisfaction in fitting a satirical message into verse as he did in solving such abstruse mathematical problems as 'the number of locally maximal elements in a random sample'.
Many of his songs originated as party pieces to play to his friends at Harvard, where he matriculated in 1943 at only 15. He made a record of a dozen of his songs to give to them as a memento, hoping to sell the rest of the 400 copies at gigs. Having managed to sell them in a couple of days, he printed more, and employed freshmen to help him to dispatch them by mail order.
His fame spread by word of mouth, and by 1954 he had sold 10,000 records. He also began playing in nightclubs such as The Blue Angel in Manhattan and the Hungry I in San Francisco, and at benefits for liberal and anti-war groups. A left-winger of the strait-laced sort who would soon be drowned out by the hippy movement, he endeared himself to his comrades with an 'uplifting song in the tradition of the great old revival hymns' about nuclear annihilation. It went: 'We will all go together when we go/ What a comforting fact that is to know/ Universal bereavement, an inspiring achievement/ Yes we will all go together when we go.' By 1957 he was performing at Carnegie Hall.
Lehrer's fame reached Britain that year, when Professor JR Sutherland, awarding an honorary music degree to Princess Margaret from the University of London, let it be known that she was a fan of his music. Talk of his songs spread through university papers and record shops, prompting the BBC to ban most of them from the airwaves the following year. In 1959 he recorded a second album, More of Tom Lehrer, and sold out several venues in the United Kingdom.
Yet it was at this moment that he began to tell his friends he wanted to stop performing. He had never gone out of his way to seek fame. At Harvard, once inundated with invitations to perform at parties, he had doubled his fee. The number of invitations halved, which suited him just fine. At the end of 1959, having toured Australia, and the UK once more, he decided to let his records earn his living for him, and return to Harvard to try to finish his PhD.
He soon concluded, however, that he had nothing original to offer academia, and gave up on the PhD in 1965. He continued to dabble with songwriting, submitting tapes of his music to That Was the Week That Was — a precursor to Saturday Night Live — and releasing a third album, That Was the Year That Was. But it tired him to tour the world, playing the same songs over and over, and he all but gave it up. On a short tour of Scandinavia in 1967 he joked that all of his songs were 'part of a huge scientific project to which I have devoted my entire life, namely, the attempt to prolong adolescence beyond all previous limits', but it seemed that experiment had reached its conclusion.
It was not only out of weariness that he retreated from the limelight, but out of a sense that popular culture had left him behind. His brand of dissent — droll, insouciant, recognisably an undergraduate parlour game — seemed an anachronism to the earnest and righteous rebels of the counterculture. About them he joked, 'It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee house or a college auditorium and come out in favour of the things everybody else is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.'
Contrary to a biographical note on one of his LPs, Thomas Andrew Lehrer was not 'raised by a yak, by whom he was always treated as one of the family', but born in Manhattan in 1928, the son of Morris Lehrer, a non-practising Jew and necktie manufacturer whose Gilbert and Sullivan records he would listen to constantly, and Anna (née Waller). He began piano lessons at the age of eight, and spent the summers of his boyhood at Camp Androscoggin in Maine, where he bumped into a younger boy whose music he would later idolise: Stephen Sondheim (obituary, November 27, 2021).
Educated at Horace Mann, a private high school in the Bronx, Lehrer skipped three years to keep himself amused. His application to Harvard took the form of a poem, the last stanza of which ran: 'But although I detest/ Learning poems and the rest/ Of the things one must know to have 'culture',/ While each of my teachers/ Makes speeches like preachers/ And preys on my faults like a vulture/ I will leave movie thrillers/ And watch caterpillars/ Get born and pupated and larva'ed/ And I'll work like a slave/ And always behave/ And maybe I'll get into Harvard.' He chose to study mathematics, judging that English involved too much reading and chemistry too much grubbing around in foul-smelling laboratories.
Once there he began writing scurrilous songs with which to entertain his peers, and surrounded himself with pranksters who would later become eminences in their respective fields: Philip Warren Anderson, who won the Nobel prize in physics; Lewis Branscombe, who became the chief scientist at IBM, and David Robinson, who became the executive director of the Carnegie Corporation. In 1951 he staged the Physical Revue (a play of words on the Physical Review, a scientific publication), a musical drama incorporating 21 of his songs. Invitations to perform at parties poured in, and steadily he acquired a following.
By 1954 he was selling records from the second floor of his house, and working as a defence contractor to avoid being conscripted. Despite his best efforts, the following year he was drafted into the Defence Department's cryptography division, which would later become the National Security Agency. He maintained that his only contribution to the NSA was a way to get around its prohibition against staff drinking alcohol at parties — jelly vodka shots.
Lehrer gave his last public performance for many years at a fundraiser for the Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972. Looking for a sunny climate and a quieter life, he began teaching a course in musical theatre at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He would later teach mathematics there too. It was tacitly understood in his classes that nobody was to mention his career as a performer. Despite his on-stage effervescence he was a deeply reticent man, whose friends hardly got a glimpse into his private life. Once asked whether he had a wife or children, he replied 'not guilty on both counts'.
Lehrer claimed that he stopped writing satire partly because 'things I once thought were funny are scary now. I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.' Indeed, he famously said a year after he retired from performing that 'political satire became obsolete when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize'.
Having relinquished fame so flippantly, he affected to care little about his legacy. When one would-be biographer came knocking, he rebuffed his offer to write his life story, but gave him the original recordings of his second album as though they were worthless to him. He felt no need to give an answer to those who wondered why one of the great lyricists of the 20th century would seem so indifferent to the fate of his own art. In 2020 he put his songs in the public domain.
Yet as a younger man he did claim to feel a degree of emotional investment in the reception of his work, saying:'If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.'
Tom Lehrer, musical satirist, was born on April 9, 1928. He died on July 27, 2025, aged 97