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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tom Lehrer obituary
No one ever fought off the trappings of fame and success so fiercely as the singer, songwriter, and mathematician Tom Lehrer, who has died aged 97. He was an enigma. The songs that made him famous were mostly written and recorded before 1960, after which he returned to teaching mathematics and tried to behave as though no one had heard of him. His songs were by turns gloriously vulgar, ludicrously macabre or ferociously political: I Got It from Agnes – 'it' being a sexually transmitted disease; I Hold Your Hand in Mine, in which the held hand is no longer attached to a body; and We Will All Go Together When We Go, perhaps the best anti-nuclear weapons song ever written, praising 'Universal bereavement / An inspiring achievement'. Others were wonderfully clever games with words and music, including The Elements (1959), which names all the chemical elements, set to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General. He began writing songs as a graduate student at Harvard, where he had enrolled at 15 and had taken a first-class maths degree at 18. He sang them to his friends and soon people started asking him to perform at parties. 'My songs spread slowly,' he said. 'Like herpes, rather than Ebola.' The politics and rudeness of his material put off the record companies, so in 1953 he paid for 400 discs to be cut of a record called Songs of Tom Lehrer, having worked out that if he sold them all, he would break even. He sold many more than that: he had to keep getting them cut. His university idyll was broken by a period with the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos, and two years in the army. 'I dodged the draft for as long as anybody was shooting at anybody,' he said. 'I waited until everything was calm and then surrendered to the draft board.' Afterwards he wrote the song It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier, about strange and disturbing army folk: 'Now Fred's an intellectual, brings a book to every meal. / He likes the deep philosophers, like Norman Vincent Peale.' Peale was a famous evangelical Christian of even more than usual banality and intolerance, and also the Trump family pastor, who gave the US president his ethical base. After the army, Lehrer returned to studying and singing in night clubs in New York and other cities, while his reputation grew in a samizdat sort of way – record companies ignored him and newspapers sneered, but his growing army of fans loved him. He undertook a series of concert tours, including in the UK, and produced another album, More of Tom Lehrer, in 1959, with a live concert version, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, also released. Then, in 1960, he stopped, and that was almost that, except that in 1964 he was lured back to write some songs for the American version of That Was the Week That Was. During the 1970s he contributed songs to the children's educational television programme The Electric Company and, two years later, appeared in episodes of the Frost Report at the BBC. There were occasional songs after that – (I'm Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica in 1990 is probably the best known ('Amid the California flora / I'll be lighting my menorah, /Like a baby in his cradle / I'll be playing with my dreidl'). In 1980, the British producer Cameron Mackintosh persuaded him to agree to a revue of his songs called Tomfoolery, which started life at the Criterion theatre in London. But Lehrer neither appeared in it nor wrote new material for it. He was done with performing. Born in New York, Tom was the elder son of James Lehrer, a prosperous necktie manufacturer, and his wife, Anna (nee Waller). He learned to play the piano, fell in love with the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter, and attended private schools, which discovered they had a mathematics prodigy on their hands. So he went to Harvard, and took a master's in 1947, the year after his degree, before settling down to the life of a graduate student, which he enjoyed. He registered for a doctorate but never finished it. Over the years he gave various reasons for stopping song-writing and performing. 'What's the point of having laurels if you can't rest on them?' he asked. He said he never supposed he might be doing some good, and quoted Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin kabaretts of the 30s, 'which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the second world war'. Things that were once funny now scared him. 'I'm not tempted to write a song about George W Bush,' he said of the then US president. 'I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.' He said that satire died when they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel peace prize, but that was not his reason for giving it up. However, if you listen to his students, you come away thinking the biggest factor was that he loved teaching and wanted to spend his life doing it. He taught on the US east coast until 1972, when he moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where for almost 30 years he taught two classes: The American Musical and The Nature of Math. The American fiction writer Greg Neri wrote: 'He was very humble, his fame meant nothing to him, the past he'd fob off as nothing more than messing around with satire. But get him talking about the American musical and he was off and running … He was truly delighted to see a play get on its feet and the day we performed it, he was all grins … He was extremely kind and patient with students.' Other former students reported that you did not mention his career as a performer, or ask about his personal life: it was an unspoken rule in his class. There is a video he recorded in 1997 called The Professor's Song. One of the songs, to another Gilbert and Sullivan tune, begins 'If you give me your attention I will tell you what I am. / I'm a brilliant mathematician, also something of a ham.' But these were private songs for his students. He had turned his back on fame and fortune. And the most dramatic illustration of that came in 2020 when he announced that his lyrics and sheet music were now available for anyone to use or perform without paying royalties. I benefited from this when writing a play called Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math and Doesn't Want to Talk to You, and including many of his greatest songs. It was performed last year at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate, north London, and is due to return this November at the OSO Arts Centre, south of the river in Barnes. 'Help yourselves, and don't send me any money,' he wrote on his website. So I did. Thomas Andrew Lehrer, singer, songwriter, satirist and mathematician, born 9 April 1928; died 26 July 2025
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tom Lehrer obituary
No one ever fought off the trappings of fame and success so fiercely as the singer, songwriter, and mathematician Tom Lehrer, who has died aged 97. He was an enigma. The songs that made him famous were mostly written and recorded before 1960, after which he returned to teaching mathematics and tried to behave as though no one had heard of him. His songs were by turns gloriously vulgar, ludicrously macabre or ferociously political: I Got It from Agnes – 'it' being a sexually transmitted disease; I Hold Your Hand in Mine, in which the held hand is no longer attached to a body; and We Will All Go Together When We Go, perhaps the best anti-nuclear weapons song ever written, praising 'Universal bereavement / An inspiring achievement'. Others were wonderfully clever games with words and music, including The Elements (1959), which names all the chemical elements, set to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General. He began writing songs as a graduate student at Harvard, where he had enrolled at 15 and had taken a first-class maths degree at 18. He sang them to his friends and soon people started asking him to perform at parties. 'My songs spread slowly,' he said. 'Like herpes, rather than Ebola.' The politics and rudeness of his material put off the record companies, so in 1953 he paid for 400 discs to be cut of a record called Songs of Tom Lehrer, having worked out that if he sold them all, he would break even. He sold many more than that: he had to keep getting them cut. His university idyll was broken by a period with the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos, and two years in the army. 'I dodged the draft for as long as anybody was shooting at anybody,' he said. 'I waited until everything was calm and then surrendered to the draft board.' Afterwards he wrote the song It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier, about strange and disturbing army folk: 'Now Fred's an intellectual, brings a book to every meal. / He likes the deep philosophers, like Norman Vincent Peale.' Peale was a famous evangelical Christian of even more than usual banality and intolerance, and also the Trump family pastor, who gave the US president his ethical base. After the army, Lehrer returned to studying and singing in night clubs in New York and other cities, while his reputation grew in a samizdat sort of way – record companies ignored him and newspapers sneered, but his growing army of fans loved him. He undertook a series of concert tours, including in the UK, and produced another album, More of Tom Lehrer, in 1959, with a live concert version, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, also released. Then, in 1960, he stopped, and that was almost that, except that in 1964 he was lured back to write some songs for the American version of That Was the Week That Was. During the 1970s he contributed songs to the children's educational television programme The Electric Company and, two years later, appeared in episodes of the Frost Report at the BBC. There were occasional songs after that – (I'm Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica in 1990 is probably the best known ('Amid the California flora / I'll be lighting my menorah, /Like a baby in his cradle / I'll be playing with my dreidl'). In 1980, the British producer Cameron Mackintosh persuaded him to agree to a revue of his songs called Tomfoolery, which started life at the Criterion theatre in London. But Lehrer neither appeared in it nor wrote new material for it. He was done with performing. Born in New York, Tom was the elder son of James Lehrer, a prosperous necktie manufacturer, and his wife, Anna (nee Waller). He learned to play the piano, fell in love with the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter, and attended private schools, which discovered they had a mathematics prodigy on their hands. So he went to Harvard, and took a master's in 1947, the year after his degree, before settling down to the life of a graduate student, which he enjoyed. He registered for a doctorate but never finished it. Over the years he gave various reasons for stopping song-writing and performing. 'What's the point of having laurels if you can't rest on them?' he asked. He said he never supposed he might be doing some good, and quoted Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin kabaretts of the 30s, 'which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the second world war'. Things that were once funny now scared him. 'I'm not tempted to write a song about George W Bush,' he said of the then US president. 'I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.' He said that satire died when they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel peace prize, but that was not his reason for giving it up. However, if you listen to his students, you come away thinking the biggest factor was that he loved teaching and wanted to spend his life doing it. He taught on the US east coast until 1972, when he moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where for almost 30 years he taught two classes: The American Musical and The Nature of Math. The American fiction writer Greg Neri wrote: 'He was very humble, his fame meant nothing to him, the past he'd fob off as nothing more than messing around with satire. But get him talking about the American musical and he was off and running … He was truly delighted to see a play get on its feet and the day we performed it, he was all grins … He was extremely kind and patient with students.' Other former students reported that you did not mention his career as a performer, or ask about his personal life: it was an unspoken rule in his class. There is a video he recorded in 1997 called The Professor's Song. One of the songs, to another Gilbert and Sullivan tune, begins 'If you give me your attention I will tell you what I am. / I'm a brilliant mathematician, also something of a ham.' But these were private songs for his students. He had turned his back on fame and fortune. And the most dramatic illustration of that came in 2020 when he announced that his lyrics and sheet music were now available for anyone to use or perform without paying royalties. I benefited from this when writing a play called Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math and Doesn't Want to Talk to You, and including many of his greatest songs. It was performed last year at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate, north London, and is due to return this November at the OSO Arts Centre, south of the river in Barnes. 'Help yourselves, and don't send me any money,' he wrote on his website. So I did. Thomas Andrew Lehrer, singer, songwriter, satirist and mathematician, born 9 April 1928; died 26 July 2025
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Tom Lehrer's influence on political satire is still playing out today
Advertisement Lehrer proved not just that the absurdity of American life could be an endlessly replenishing source of comedy, but that there was a decent-sized audience for that comedy. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up As Lehrer's subject matter encompassed the nuclear arms race ('Who's Next,' 'A Song for World War III,' 'We Will All Go Together When We Go'), organized religion ('Vatican Rag'), the sanctimony of self-satisfied liberals ('The Folk Song Army'), bigotry ('I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,' 'National Brotherhood Week'), military might as a tool of diplomacy ('Send the Marines'), saccharine nostalgia ('My Home Town,' 'Bright College Days'), the falsity of Hemingway-style glamorization of bullfighting ('In Old Mexico'), and unusual forms of recreation ('Poisoning Pigeons in the Park'). Advertisement Few satirists have zeroed in on contradiction, hypocrisy, or inanity with more scalpel-like precision than Lehrer. In the prescient 'Pollution,' he sang: 'Pollution, pollution/ You can use the latest toothpaste/And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste.' With 'Whatever Became of Hubert?', Lehrer lampooned onetime liberal lion Hubert Humphrey, whose voice grew muted after he agreed to be Lyndon B. Johnson's vice president: 'Whatever became of Hubert?/Has anyone heard a thing?/Once he shone, on his own/Now he sits home alone/And waits for the phone to ring.' In 'Wernher von Braun,' Lehrer lampooned the morally flexible scientist who designed weapons for the Nazis and later worked for NASA, with the lyric, sung by Lehrer in a German accent: ''Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun.' Dressed in a suit and tie and accompanying himself on the piano, Lehrer loved to upend expectations. His 'I Hold Your Hand in Mine' starts off as a delicate ballad but quickly turns disconcertingly … literal. There was a genius to some of his rhymes. In 'Smut,' he sang: 'Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?/I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley; But now they're trying to take it all away from us unless/We take a stand, and hand-in-hand we fight for freedom of the press/In other words: Smut!' Advertisement Growing up in Manhattan, Lehrer saw a lot of Broadway musicals. And it showed. His affection for Gilbert and Sullivan was also palpable, especially in 'The Elements,' a listing of the chemical elements set to the tune of their classic patter song 'I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.' Lehrer contributed songs to NBC's satirical 'That Was the Week That Was' (1963-1965), a US version of a British show, and later released the songs in an album titled 'That Was the Year That Was.' In the early '80s, his songs formed the spine of 'Tomfoolery,' a musical revue presented in London and New York. His debut album, 'Songs by Tom Lehrer,' released in 1953, sold half-a-million copies, But part of Lehrer's mystique stemmed from how relatively soon he left the public stage. Academia was where he felt most at home, and that's where he spent most of his life. He taught math at Harvard (which he had entered as a student when he was only 15) and MIT. However much they mine similar territory, today's late-night TV hosts are different from Lehrer in one important respect: They are idealists. Disappointed idealists, to be sure, but idealists all the same. Not Lehrer, at least not on the evidence of his songs. What undergirds his comedy is a certain wised-up quality. Not disillusionment, because he had no illusions to shatter. Whereas today's political satirists seek not just to garner laughs but to change minds, you always got the sense that Lehrer was primarily interested in amusing himself. His brilliance was such that he ended up amusing the rest of us as well. Advertisement He famously said that 'Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.' Lehrer was wrong about that. And he himself was a big part of the reason why. Don Aucoin can be reached at
Time of India
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Tom Lehrer, the genius who made satire sing, passes away at 97
(Picture Courtesy: Facebook) Tom Lehrer, the sharp-witted satirist and math prodigy whose songs showcased American life with urbane, often humor, has died at the age of 97. His death was confirmed by longtime friend David Herder to The New York Times, with no cause disclosed. Reportedly, Tom Lehrer passed away at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving behind a body of work that spanned only seven years but made a mark far beyond. A Harvard graduate at 15, he first entertained classmates with comic tunes before recording Songs by Tom Lehrer, a self-funded album that circulated across campuses and sparked a national following. Travis Kelce Posts Picture With Taylor Swift, His Screen Lock Picture Has Left Fans Gushing A short, brilliant, and fearless flame Though Tom Lehrer officially composed just 37 songs, the legacy he carved was unforgettable. From 'National Brotherhood Week' to 'We Will All Go Together When We Go,' his tracks poked fun at hypocrisy, racism, war, and institutional absurdities, all while keeping a breezy, clever tone. Songs like 'New Math' and 'Lobachevsky' highlighted his love for numbers, blending his intellectual composition with lyrical flair. Legacy beyond the spotlight Despite his impact, Tom Lehrer walked away from performance and fame early. He was focusing on teaching math at Harvard and MIT, and musical theater at UC Santa Cruz. He often joked that the state of the world had outpaced his satire. 'Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize,' he once quipped, as reported by Hindustan Times. Tom Lehrer never married, and in later years, reflected that what once seemed funny now felt frightening. Still, his legacy endured, from The Elements being performed by Daniel Radcliffe to his samples appearing in modern hip-hop. Meanwhile, Tom Lehrer's early performances usually dealt with dark comedy and also non-topical subjects. One such example is the song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". With his demise. the music industry has indeed lost a gem.
