Latest news with #satire
News24
3 hours ago
- Politics
- News24
Familiar Falsehoods: Owner of viral SA satire site has a history of fake news operations
An online article and Facebook post by News Vine this month claimed that politician Kenny Kunene had been "gunned down" while fleeing the country, a fake story published under the guise of "satire". Be among those who shape the future with knowledge. Uncover exclusive stories that captivate your mind and heart with our FREE 14-day subscription trial. Dive into a world of inspiration, learning, and empowerment. You can only trial once. Start your FREE trial now Show Comments ()
The Independent
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Cameron Mackintosh in tribute to ‘wry, generous and utterly original' Tom Lehrer
West End impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh has remembered US song satirist Tom Lehrer as 'wry, generous and utterly original' following his death aged 97. Lehrer died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to reports. In his work he satirised marriage, politics, racism and the Cold War, and his songs included Poisoning Pigeons In The Park, The Old Dope Peddler, Be Prepared and The Vatican Rag, which took aim at the Roman Catholic Church. Sir Cameron said in a tribute that Lehrer 'was a very special kind of genius – a master of language, mathematics and contagious melody whose wickedly witty intellect defined an era of musical satire and influenced everyone else that followed him'. He said: 'At the piano he was a maestro of devilish charm and exquisite timing, able to make a song about drug addiction, The Old Dope Peddler, sound like a lullaby. 'But in real life he had no ambition to be a performer and was actually quite modest and shy – writing these outrageous songs for the delight of his friends and peers.' Lehrer began his working life in academia and science, before being drafted into the US Army in 1955. He used his military experience to write the songs The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be and It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be A Soldier. The tribute continued: 'Eventually, he was persuaded to appear in concerts around the world, but he only did so so that he could travel – at someone else's expense. 'By the early 1960s, he was not only bored with touring but also writing, using the excuse that, 'political satire had become obsolete when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize'. 'Tom wanted to go back to his 'day-job', teaching mathematics and running classes on The History Of Musical Theatre on the side. 'I had grown up in the mid-50s listening to recordings of his wonderful songs, and shortly after I had produced my first international hit Side By Side by Sondheim in the mid-70s, I suddenly got the idea that Tom's material might also work as a stage revue. 'When we met, he was disarmingly grateful for me wanting to, 'exhume and repackage' his 'meagre oeuvre and foist it on a previously unsuspecting audience', as long as I was to send him some sums of money from time to time – that was the nearest we ever got to a contract. 'That was Tom – wry, generous and utterly original. 'It was the start of what Tom calls 'a perfect blendship' that lasted over 50 years, and I am profoundly grateful that I had the privilege of getting to know such an extraordinary man so well.' Lehrer was born in New York City, and his involvement with music began when he was sent to piano lessons by his mother during his childhood. In the early 1960s he worked as the in-house songwriter for the US edition of satirical TV show That Was The Week That Was, and in 2012, some 60 years after its initial recording, his song The Old Dope Peddler was sampled by rapper 2 Chainz on his debut album Based On A T.R.U. Story. Sir Cameron continued: 'Tom's legacy is timeless, his humour still terrifyingly relevant and I like to think he's getting ready to stage The Vatican Rag behind the Pearly Gates. Standing room only, of course.' Theatre owner Sir Cameron has produced three of the world's longest-running musicals – Les Miserables, The Phantom Of The Opera, and Cats. He owns venues including London's Sondheim, Noel Coward and Prince Edward theatres.
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Tom Lehrer was the face of the real 1950s
There never was a time like the 1950s — not even during the 1950s. Not if you have in mind the decade of conformity, of moms in pearls and churchgoing families, of patriotic youth and apple pies cooling on the sills of tidy new suburban homes. The '50s were a time of protest, division and disillusionment. Tom Lehrer set it to bouncy music and satirical lyrics.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tom Lehrer, Song Satirist and Mathematician, Dies at 97
Tom Lehrer, the popular and erudite song satirist who lampooned marriage, politics, racism and the Cold War, then largely abandoned his music career to return to teaching math at Harvard and other universities, has died. He was 97. Longtime friend David Herder said Lehrer died Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He did not specify a cause of death. More from Billboard Gone But Not Forgotten: Musicians We Lost in 2025 Pantera Cancel Tour Dates to Mourn Ozzy Osbourne Ed Sheeran Expands 2026 Australia and New Zealand Tour 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 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, Mass., 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 '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 the song '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 The 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.' Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart Solve the daily Crossword
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why today's toothless comedians can't compare to Tom Lehrer
If you've ever laughed at a satirical song, whether watching a panel show, a live comedy gig or on Radio 4, there's a good chance that it would not have existed without Tom Lehrer, the brilliant mathematician and musician who has died at the age of 97. Lehrer did not write many songs, but his influence on comic music is almost without parallel; he went further and harder than anyone else ever had before, and the results were jaw-dropping in both their wit and (apparent) tastelessness. Yet what makes his death all the sadder is that, without him, satirical music has lost its godfather, and those who claim to follow in his footsteps are toothless and sedate by comparison. Nobody would dream of tackling the hot-button issues that Lehrer dealt with head-on, and the tentative, unimaginative efforts of even today's best comedians seem cowardly in comparison with what the grand vizier of satire came up with. Lehrer was at least celebrated in his own time by the cognoscenti. Sometimes, this was not entirely shared by the wider world; the New York Times sniffed that 'Mr Lehrer is not fettered by such inhibiting features as taste'. The subject of its disdain was, of course, delighted by such criticism, because the whole point of satire is that it should not be tasteful or polite. Instead, at its most devastating, it should be rude, crude and raucous. The fact that Lehrer performed his songs over nicely judged piano arrangements does not detract one inch from the sentiments contained within them. In this, he was the natural heir to a tradition that had begun centuries before. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was quite normal for ballads to be sold on the street for a penny or so, to be sung over a simple tune. Often the point of these ballads was to poke fun at politicians or royalty or at some risible custom or tradition of the day. These stabs at satire were not always appreciated by those who they were aimed at, and their creators could be whipped or placed in the stocks for their transgression: in extremis, satirists could have their noses cut off. Musical satire ventured into the mainstream in the 19th century, finding perhaps its greatest expression through the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. (Lehrer would later appropriate the duo's most vitriolic work, The Major General's Song, for his scientific satire The Elements.) Many early 20th century music hall performers were unsparing in their criticism of British wartime ineptitude and waste – some of the songs can be found in the revue Oh! What A Lovely War – but after WWII, public appetite for satire on the horrors of war appeared to be at an all time low on both sides of the Atlantic. Instead, gentler parody was in vogue, such as the pianist Victor Borge's mild, inoffensive Happy Birthday in the style of Rachmaninov. By the time that Lehrer emerged in the mid Fifties, there was a pent-up desire for a different and more challenging kind of comedy. Such songs of his as Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and The Masochism Tango represented an edgier black humour that played extremely well with his university-educated, literate audiences, who delighted in the sense of boundaries being transgressed and good taste being left at the door. Lehrer was working on two separate levels. The first was straightforward humorous parody, such as his Harvard football song Fight Fiercely Harvard and The Elements, in which he listed the periodic table to the tune of the Major General's Song (which, of course, represented a tip of the hat to his musical comedy predecessors.) The second, however, was more pointed and overtly satirical. When he wrote We Will All Go Together When We Go in 1959, it might have been seen as a commentary on the American way of death. However, with the impending sceptre of nuclear war, it soon became clear that such lyrics as 'we will all fry together when we fry/we'll be French fried potatoes by and by' were not simply wry observation but instead commentary on the rapidly accelerating atomic age. Lehrer was especially popular in Britain by this time. It is not hard to see him as a transatlantic cousin of such satirical acts as Beyond the Fringe, the musical comedy duo Flanders and Swann and the members of That Was The Week That Was, which occasionally used similarly Lehrer-esque songs in their shows to illustrate some topical point. Yet even here, the Cook-Moore-Miller-Bennett quartet preferred to veer into silliness rather than the cutting and focused anger of Lehrer. When he wrote National Brotherhood Week, a satire on race relations, and prefaced its live performance by saying 'this year, for example, on the first day of the week, Malcolm X was killed, which gives you an idea of how effective the whole thing is', the gasps of shock from the audience are barely concealed by the giddy laughter. It is simply impossible to imagine that someone would have made a similar joke today about, say, George Floyd without being cancelled. And this, unfortunately, proved to be the issue with Lehrer. Underneath his Harvard professor exterior, all big smiles and thick glasses, his most famous songs tore into contemporary society with a rare degree of wit and viciousness that set an impossibly high bar for any musical comedian to follow him. In many regards, he was the punk rocker of his day, tearing polite and acceptable convention to pieces in outrageous yet hilarious fashion. Even today, his work is still bracing, and deeply funny. Yet by the mid Sixties, Lehrer had retired from creating music and instead focused on his academic work. He remarked, in a quip that defined the rest of his career, that 'Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize'. It's a great tragedy that Lehrer proved himself a brilliant one-off rather than the father of a new strain of musical satire. Monty Python, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band and America's Weird Al Yankovic had their moments, but their humour was parodic and broad, as opposed to the refined scalpel that Lehrer liked to use, and they lacked the devastating anger of their predecessor. The songs would make you laugh, but they would seldom make you think too hard afterwards. (In the late Eighties, the British duo Kit and the Widow came close with the anti-Section 28 ditty Burn the F----ts.) Today, the fine art of the satirical song seems almost to have died out with Lehrer. Tim Minchin and Randy Newman are fine, but we look in vain for the great satirical song that will take on British or American politicians, the trans movement, wokery or the Israel-Palestine conflict. (For my money, Blame Canada from the South Park film is the only satirical song of the last few decades that really comes close to Lehrer's heyday, mixing a brilliant tune with lyrics that make you sit up and gasp with their daring and vitriol.) Perhaps this is inevitable. Lehrer himself remarked in the early 2000s that 'I don't think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It's not even preaching to the converted; it's titillating the converted'. Tom Lehrer's five funniest songs 1. Poisoning Pigeons in the Park (1959) One of Lehrer's best-known and best-loved songs, this one focuses on the idea of a romantic Sunday morning seeing the narrator and his sweetheart laying waste to the local pigeons. The lyrics are some of Lehrer's finest – 'We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment/Except for the few we take home to experiment' – and the joyously macabre sentiments make this a perennial favourite. 2. I Hold Your Hand In Mine (1953) If you can imagine what a Roald Dahl short story would sound like if it was turned into an elegant parody of a torch song, I Hold Your Hand In Mine is pretty much it. As Lehrer's besotted narrator segues from swooning romantic to obsessed murderer, the laughs keep coming, even as he complains: 'For now each time I kiss it, I get bloodstains on my tie.' 3. National Brotherhood Week (1965) Even by the often uncompromising standards of Lehrer, this song – which rivals Mel Brooks' Springtime for Hitler for jaw-dropping tastelessness – is strong stuff in its denigration of racial tensions, which the singer calls 'as American as apple pie'. As he declares 'Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics/And the Catholics hate the Protestants/And the Hindus hate the Muslims/And everybody hates the Jews' the listener is briefly transported into another, edgier world, in which satire of this kind was ever considered not just possible, but hilarious. 4. Send The Marines (1965) That Lehrer stopped writing and performing songs before the Nixon era began is always to be regretted, but it is likely that his reaction to that (and to many other political issues) might be encompassed by his attack on mindless imperialism. It is beautifully and simply expressed in lyrics such as 'They've got to be protected/All their rights respected/Til someone we like can be elected'. Like so many of Lehrer's songs, there are countless conflicts that it could apply to, and it seems every bit as prescient as it did 60 years ago. 5. We Will All Go Together When We Go (1959) It is not yet known what form Lehrer's funeral will take, but it would not seem inappropriate for this particular song to be played at it. Initially it appears to be a dark satire on the American way of death, poking fun at how we are all reduced to the same insignificance after we die. But when Lehrer sings 'For if the bomb that drops on you/Gets your friends and neighbours too/There'll be nobody left behind to grieve', the well-observed balance throughout his work between horror and hilarity finds perhaps its simplest, and nastiest, expression.
