Legendary Mass. satirist who sang of the joys of ‘poisoning pigeons' dies at 97
Longtime friend David Herder said Lehrer died Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He did not specify a cause of death.
Lehrer had remained on the math faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz well into his late 70s. In 2020, he even turned away from his own copyright, granting the public permission to use his lyrics in any format without any fee in return.
A Harvard prodigy (he had earned a math degree from the institution at age 18), Lehrer soon turned his very sharp mind to old traditions and current events. His songs included 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,' 'The Old Dope Peddler' (set to a tune reminiscent of 'The Old Lamplighter'), 'Be Prepared' (in which he mocked the Boy Scouts) and 'The Vatican Rag,' in which Lehrer, an atheist, poked at the rites and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church. (Sample lyrics: 'Get down on your knees, fiddle with your rosaries. Bow your head with great respect, and genuflect, genuflect, genuflect.')
Accompanying himself on piano, he performed the songs in a colorful style reminiscent of such musical heroes as Gilbert and Sullivan and Stephen Sondheim, the latter a lifelong friend. Lehrer was often likened to such contemporaries as Allen Sherman and Stan Freberg for his comic riffs on culture and politics and he was cited by Randy Newman and 'Weird Al' Yankovic among others as an influence.
He mocked the forms of music he didn't like (modern folk songs, rock 'n' roll and modern jazz), laughed at the threat of nuclear annihilation and denounced discrimination.
But he attacked in such an erudite, even polite, manner that almost no one objected.
'Tom Lehrer is the most brilliant song satirist ever recorded,' musicologist Barry Hansen once said. Hansen co-produced the 2000 boxed set of Lehrer's songs, 'The Remains of Tom Lehrer,' and had featured Lehrer's music for decades on his syndicated 'Dr. Demento' radio show.
Lehrer's body of work was actually quite small, amounting to about three dozen songs.
'When I got a funny idea for a song, I wrote it. And if I didn't, I didn't,' Lehrer told The Associated Press in 2000 during a rare interview. 'I wasn't like a real writer who would sit down and put a piece of paper in the typewriter. And when I quit writing, I just quit. ... It wasn't like I had writer's block.'
He'd gotten into performing accidentally when he began to compose songs in the early 1950s to amuse his friends. Soon he was performing them at coffeehouses around Cambridge, while he remained at Harvard to teach and obtain a master's degree in math.
He cut his first record in 1953, 'Songs by Tom Lehrer,' which included 'I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,' lampooning the attitudes of the Old South, and the 'Fight Fiercely, Harvard,' suggesting how a prissy Harvard blueblood might sing a football fight song.
After a two-year stint in the Army, Lehrer began to perform concerts of his material in venues around the world. In 1959, he released another LP called 'More of Tom Lehrer' and a live recording called 'An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer,' nominated for a Grammy for best comedy performance (musical) in 1960.
But around the same time, he largely quit touring and returned to teaching math, though he did some writing and performing on the side.
Lehrer said he was never comfortable appearing in public.
'I enjoyed it up to a point,' he told The AP in 2000. 'But to me, going out and performing the concert every night when it was all available on record would be like a novelist going out and reading his novel every night.'
He did produce a political satire song each week for the 1964 television show 'That Was the Week That Was,' a groundbreaking topical comedy show that anticipated 'Saturday Night Live' a decade later.
He released the songs the following year in an album titled 'That Was the Year That Was.' The material included 'Who's Next?' that ponders which government will be the next to get the nuclear bomb ... perhaps Alabama? (He didn't need to tell his listeners that it was a bastion of segregation at the time.) 'Pollution' takes a look at the then-new concept that perhaps rivers and lakes should be cleaned up.
He also wrote songs for the 1970s educational children's show 'The Electric Company.' He told AP in 2000 that hearing from people who had benefited from them gave him far more satisfaction than praise for any of his satirical works.
His songs were revived in the 1980 musical revue 'Tomfoolery' and he made a rare public appearance in London in 1998 at a celebration honoring that musical's producer, Cameron Mackintosh.
Lehrer was born in 1928, in New York City, the son of a successful necktie designer. He recalled an idyllic childhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side that included attending Broadway shows with his family and walking through Central Park day or night.
After skipping two grades in school, he entered Harvard at 15 and, after receiving his master's degree, he spent several years unsuccessfully pursuing a doctorate.
'I spent many, many years satisfying all the requirements, as many years as possible, and I started on the thesis,' he once said. 'But I just wanted to be a grad student, it's a wonderful life. That's what I wanted to be, and unfortunately, you can't be a Ph.D. and a grad student at the same time.'
He began to teach part-time at Santa Cruz in the 1970s, mainly to escape the harsh New England winters.
From time to time, he acknowledged, a student would enroll in one of his classes based on knowledge of his songs.
'But it's a real math class,' he said at the time. 'I don't do any funny theorems. So those people go away pretty quickly.'
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Chicago Tribune
4 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Celebrating the one and only Tom Lehrer, the satirical voice of generations
Fame is a drug, fed by attention, applause and money. Those who become addicted sometimes have a desperate need to hold on, even as the talents that brought renown begin to fade and eventually disappear. Which brings me to Tom Lehrer. He died on July 26 at 97, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had once been a student at Harvard University and taught there too. He had been out of the public eye for decades, but his death prompted a New York Times obituary that covered almost an entire page of that newspaper and the internet was filled with memories. Former local sportswriter Ron Rapoport wrote on Facebook that 'much of my generation felt a special sadness (at the news of his death) … Lehrer was the greatest satirical songwriter of his time and he wrote the background music to much of our lives.' Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker wrote that 'Lehrer's gifts included an extraordinary and easily overlooked musicality, the secret sauce of his satire. One simple reason his songs endure is that, for all that they are written for their words, it's hard to stop humming their tunes.' My first memories of him were of his piano and voice pouring from the record albums played in my parents' living room and the laughter that accompanied them. When I first heard them, I was too young to fully understand the lyrics. But his lively piano playing grabbed me, as did his cheery singing and eventually I grew into his ingenious, satirical, subversive lyrics and have been a devoted fan ever since. He wrote and recorded 40 or so songs and performed them in 100-some concerts, modest numbers for his towering reputation. But his decision to dump his career at its height only added to his legend. As he said, 'I don't feel the need for anonymous affection. If they buy my records, I love that. But I don't think I need people in the dark applauding.' Lehrer was born and raised in Manhattan, one of two sons of Morris James Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Anna (Waller) Lehrer, who divorced when he was 14. After graduating early from a Connecticut prep school, he went to Harvard, where he majored in mathematics and received his bachelor's degree in 1946, at 18, and earned a master's degree the next year. He took piano lessons as a child, but shied away from the classics and was drawn to the music of Broadway show tunes and such composers as Cole Porter, Gilbert and Sullivan and the comedy songs of Abe Burrows. It was in college that he began playing his own songs, mostly for classmates. His friends convinced him to make a record. He thought his songs might sell a few hundred copies, so he booked a studio, recorded 11 tunes, had 400 copies of the record pressed and began to sell via mail order. That first album soon sold 350,000, fueled primarily by word of mouth, especially on college campuses. Most Chicagoans first heard Lehrer when his music was played on the radio by a young talent named Mike Nichols. Before his Nichols & May comedy duo act and directorial successes, he created and hosted 'The Midnight Special' on WFMT. Lehrer's performance life started then, was interrupted by a two-year Army hitch, and by the late 1950s came nightclub engagements in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Canada and Europe. He played here, twice at Orchestra Hall, turning down the frequent offers from the brothers George and Oscar Marienthal to play their club, Mister Kelly's. Then he was done. Yes, he resumed briefly in 1965 but then stopped for good in 1967, except for contributing a few songs for TV's 'The Electric Company.' His life became one of academics, with teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, where he also taught classes on Broadway musicals. A new generation met Lehrer in 1980 when the British producer Cameron Mackintosh (the man behind such shows as 'Phantom of the Opera,' 'Miss Saigon' and 'Les Misérables') presented 'Tomfoolery,' a revue of Lehrer's songs. It was a smash in London and later came to New York, Washington, Dublin and here in 1982. The show played at the Apollo Theater and was reviewed by Tribune drama critic Richard Christiansen, who wrote that it was 'an extremely smart, slick little review that gives us an entertaining opportunity to re-examine and re-enjoy the work of a very gifted comic moralist of our time.' Lehrer also chatted on the radio with Studs Terkel. Jason Brett owned the Apollo with Stuart Oken when 'Toomfoolery' came to town, and over the weekend he told me, 'His songs had people howling during the show's all too brief run. Understandable. Growing up, I played his album so much, my brother hid it from me.' Lest this story seem a mere nostalgia jaunt, think of it rather as an introduction. The internet is awash in clips of Lehrer and, in keeping with his spirit, he gave away all his music a few years ago, placing it in the public domain. His website is still alive and a wonderful repository. It's possible that some of the songs' subjects — Wernher Von Braun, the German rocket scientist who worked for the Nazis and then for the U.S. — might not register with you folks who enjoyed the weekend's Lollapalooza, but you will find that most of his work is timeless. To my mind, it's impossible not to like his 'National Brotherhood Week':Or not appreciate his take on nuclear proliferation, 'Who's Next?':Lehrer's work received a lot of praise ('In his inimitable and ghastly way … he has a kind of genius') but also had detractors ('More desperate than amusing'). He was angrily assailed in some quarters and no more so than for his 'The Vatican Rag': Often wrongly compared to his 'funny' songwriting contemporary Allan Sherman, who was much tamer, he is a lot closer to 'Weird Al' Yankovic, who has gladly admitted to Lehrer's influence. Or to comic Mort Sahl. But he was, remains, one of a rare kind. Oh, one more thing, from writer Gerald Nachman in his wonderful book, 'Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1850s and 1960s,' Lehrer was 'famous for introducing the 'Jell-O shot' … which he perfected in the service as a way to smuggle booze into the barracks.'
San Francisco Chronicle
10 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
An Australian artist is creating a massive mural in the middle of a small North Dakota town
MINOT, N.D. (AP) — High atop a massive grain elevator in the middle of Minot, North Dakota, artist Guido van Helten swipes a concrete wall with a brush that looks more appropriate for painting a fence than creating a monumental mural. Back and forth van Helten brushes, focused on his work and not bothered by the sheer enormity of his task as he stands in a boom lift, 75 feet (23 meters) off the ground, and focused on a few square feet of a structure that stretches over most of a city block. 'When you use these old structures to kinda share stories and use them as a vehicle to carry an image of identity, it becomes part of the landscape,' he said. 'I've found that people have really adopted them and become really super proud of them.' The work on the former Union Silos is van Helten's latest effort to paint murals on a gigantic scale, with earlier projects on structures ranging from a dam in Australia to part of a former cooling tower at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine. Although he has created murals throughout the world, grain silos in the U.S. Midwest have been among his most frequent sites. 'I do enjoy the opportunity to uncover stories that are often kinda considered out of the way or flyover communities,' he said. Van Helten has been creating murals for years, working increasingly in the U.S. over the past seven years and around the world. The 38-year-old Brisbane native's interest in regional communities began in earnest after a mural he created years ago on a silo in an Australian town of 100 people. The new idea, he said, drew interest, and he began a series of commissions around Australia and the U.S. He uses a mineral silicate paint formulated to absorb and bond with concrete, and it lasts a long time. He mixes tones specific to the color of the wall and subtly layers the work so it blends in. 'I love the coloring of these buildings, so I don't want to fight with them, I don't want to change it, I don't want it to be bright. I want it to become part of the landscape,' he said. It's not a quick process, as van Helten initially meets with residents to learn about a community and then spends months slowly transforming what is usually the largest structure in a small town. He began painting in Minot in May with plans for a 360-degree mural that combines photography with painting to depict the people and culture of an area. The Minot elevator and silos were built in the 1950s and were an economic center for years before they ceased operations around the early 1990s. Van Helten isn't giving too much away about what his Minot mural will depict, but said he has been inspired by concepts of land and ownership while in North Dakota, from ranching and the oil field to Native American perspectives. Minot is a city of nearly 50,000 people and sits near the Bakken oil field and Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. 'It is really when you boil down to it in many ways about land and how different cultures interpret that and connect with it, and I feel it's really interesting in North Dakota because it is really such a big, open land,' the artist said. Much of the mural is still taking shape, but images of a barn and female figures are visible. Property owner Derek Hackett said the mural is 'a great way to take what is kind of a blighted property and be able to give it a facelift and kind of resurrect its presence in our skyline." Soon the mural will be visible from almost anywhere in town, he said. The mural project is entirely donation-funded, costing about $350,000, about 85% of which is already raised, said Chelsea Gleich, a spokesperson for the project. 'It is uniquely ours, it's uniquely North Dakota and you'll never be able to find a piece just like this anywhere else,' she said.
New York Post
12 hours ago
- New York Post
‘Naked Gun' director Akiva Schaffer ‘threatened to quit' to save this ‘polarizing' scene
Warning: spoilers below for 'The Naked Gun.' Leslie Nielsen would be proud. Director Akiva Schaffer, 47, has revealed that he 'threatened to quit' the 'Naked Gun' reboot to save a scene that the movie's other writers wanted to cut. 8 Akiva Schaffer speaks onstage during the 'Chip 'N Dale: Rescue Rangers' premiere at El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California, on May 18, 2022. Getty Images for Disney 8 Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson in the newly released 'The Naked Gun' reboot. ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection 'It was polarizing in script reads,' Schaffer said on Monday's episode of IndieWire's 'Filmmaker Toolkit' podcast. 'People I really respect, like Andy Sandberg, when he read it for me, he was like, 'Snowman's the best. Do not let them cut it,' knowing it would be cuttable.' 'It makes sense once you see the movie, but at one point I did have to threaten to quit,' he added. The 'polarizing' montage in question comes when Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) and Beth (Pamela Anderson) share a short romantic getaway in a snowy cabin. 8 Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. and Pamela Anderson as Beth in 'The Naked Gun' (2025). ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection After using a magical spell book to bring a snowman to life, the pair engage in a threesome with the snowman until he suddenly turns violent. Schaffer, who co-wrote the reboot with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, admitted that he did cut down part of the montage just in case it was completely removed from the film. The Lonely Island alum was ultimately proven right when the sequence became 'the No. 1 scene' in the entire movie. 8 Paul Walter Hauser, Akiva Schaffer and Liam Neeson on the set of 'The Naked Gun' (2025). AP 'After the first test screen, it was the No. 1 scene in the movie,' Schaffer said. 'The people who really fought me on it after ate a lot of crow without me asking. I tried to let them off the hook easy, and go, 'That's fine,' but they were like, 'No, dude, we were wrong.'' Elsewhere during the podcast, Schaffer revealed that they only included the snowman montage as a throwback to the original 1988 'Naked Gun' starring Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin and Priscilla Presley as Jane Spencer. In the original, Nielsen and Presley's characters appear in an absurd scene that shows them running hand-in-hand on the beach and laughing during a showing of the dark war drama 'Platoon' while Herman's Hermits play in the background. 8 Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. in the new 'The Naked Gun' reboot. AP 8 Pamela Anderson as Beth in the new 'The Naked Gun' reboot. AP 'We got to the point in our script, we were like, 'Wow, this love story deserves a montage,'' Schaffer explained. 'The original 'Naked Gun' has a very famous, very good montage set to 'I'm Into Something Good.'' 'We knew it had to be different than that,' he continued. 'And then also, there's been 30 years of making fun of montages, whether it's 'Team America' doing a montage or whatever, there's not a lot of room left in the montage. We were debating not doing a montage and had a few other ideas.' It wasn't until the 'Hot Rod' director got up to use the bathroom late one night that the snowman idea popped into his head. 8 A poster for 'The Naked Gun' featuring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson. Copious Management/Paramount 'When I got back in bed, it had been percolating that day in the writers' room, and I just saw the entire thing and wrote it into bullet point notes, and then texted it to Dan and Doug,' he shared. 'The next morning, I came into the writers' room and they were like, 'Yeah, done.'' But Schaffer was not the only one to 'love' the 'polarizing' montage, because Pamela Anderson has also spoken about how much she enjoyed shooting that particular scene with her rumored new beau, Liam Neeson. 'I remember Liam and other people saying, 'What is this?'' the 'Baywatch' alum, 58, told Entertainment Weekly. 'But I was like, 'It makes perfect sense to me.' It feels like Akiva's signature.' 8 Akiva Schaffer, Erica Huggins and Seth MacFarlane attend a 'The Naked Gun' special screening at Paramount Pictures Studios on July 14, 2025, in Los Angeles, California. Getty Images for Paramount Pictures 'I know he fought really hard to keep that in because as things grow and then there's budgets and they figure out what they want to use, he was insistent that had to stay in,' she added. 'He's throwing himself on the sword for that one, so he knows something we don't.' Anderson joked that it was even more fun filming the snowman montage than watching it. 'She was in bed with us, so the threesome with the snowman was quite interesting,' Anderson said of the snowman's puppeteer. 'There are very specific rules dealing with people in costumes — you're not supposed to directly talk to the puppeteer. And this was a full-on, Hansen-level costume.' 'Inside, there's a person with these night vision goggles, or whatever you want to call them, in there telling which way to turn,' she added. 'It's very, very complex. It's very robotic.'
