I discovered Tom Lehrer in high school. His transgressive black humor hooked me.
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I don't remember exactly how I first encountered the music of Tom Lehrer, the satirical singer, songwriter, pianist, and mathematician
It might've been reading 'Oedipus Rex' for English class and stumbling on Lehrer's irreverent parody of the Greek tragedy, set to an overly peppy ragtime ('He loved his mother and she loved him, and yet his story is rather grim,'
There wouldn't seem to be much to connect a 21st-century kid with a Harvard-educated math prodigy who rose to fame in the 1950s with short, rhymey ditties set to cheerful tunes that skewered midcentury America, geopolitics, and cultural mores. But one way or another, I was hooked.
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Lehrer's music was everything my nerdy teenage self craved. As a lapsed piano student, I appreciated seeing him turn what I'd treated as a chore into a vehicle for social commentary. As a history obsessive, Lehrer's dark parodies of the issues of his day — from
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Lehrer was also transgressive, wielding black humor against taboo subjects like
Others spotted Lehrer's youthful appeal long before I did. He matriculated to Harvard at 15 and
But if you're long out of primary school and still unfamiliar with Lehrer, never fear. Decades later, his satire still zings. As fears grow that Iran and other countries will rush to build nuclear weapons, Lehrer's 1965 '
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And at a time when political satirists are
So what's the best way to experience Lehrer today? I maintain it's the black-and-white
Watching lets you appreciate Lehrer's smooth finger work and comedic timing, the arched eyebrow or guileless grin as he croons out a particularly savage line. Lehrer banters with the audience as he tees up each new song. And the recordings capture listeners' reactions, a hint of how subversive some of his lyrics were at the time. Midway through a 1967 rendition of 'Wernher von Braun,' as Lehrer affects a German accent to mock the onetime Nazi's disregard for civilian life, you can hear a man let out
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There's a practical reason to focus on those older clips, too: few others exist. Lehrer largely stopped playing publicly in the 1970s and went back to teaching college math, splitting time between Cambridge and California. Although album sales brought in money, he took an almost dilettantish approach to his musical career and later expressed surprise that his work had endured. As
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