The inimitable Tom Lehrer once told an audience that his ambition was to advance “from adolescence to senility, hoping to bypass maturity.” By all evidence, he had achieved only two-thirds of those goals when he died last week at age 97, his sparkling, subversive wit still intact.
As recently as November 2022, Lehrer posted notice on his bare-bones Web site—tomlehrersongs.com—renouncing copyright for all of his works, and granting permission “to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.” But he warned: “THIS WEBSITE WILL BE TAKEN DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.”
Long before there was “Weird Al” Yankovic or Randy Rainbow, before there were viral videos or TikTok, or Saturday Night Live or Forbidden Broadway, Lehrer’s self-published vinyl albums of pastiche and parody songs—a beguiling blend of erudite rhymes and elegantly dirty ideas—gave the Silent Generation (and later the baby-boomers and everyone else) a shared shorthand for sticking it to a staid Establishment.
Lehrer—a Harvard-trained mathematician who last performed in public decades ago and whose entire catalogue consisted of only about 50 recorded songs—was the ultimate nonconformist in the conformist Eisenhower culture that made him a cult star in nightclubs and on college campuses. Eventually, he also became a gentler contributor of children’s songs such as “Silent E” to public television’s The Electric Company. His targets ranged from the Boy Scouts to college cheerleading, from plagiarism to prudishness, and he wrote one love song about necrophilia and another gaily celebrating the transmission of venereal disease. He immortalized that light-fingered Russian mathematician Nikolay Ivanovich Lobachevsky by lifting a Kurt Weill–Ira Gershwin tongue twister about Tchaikovsky performed by Danny Kaye. He manufactured an aide-mémoire for the periodic table of the elements in the mold of Gilbert and Sullivan. And he summarized the saga of Oedipus Rex with a succinctness surpassing Sophocles:
Yes, he loved his mother like no other,
His daughter was his sister, and his son was his brother.
One thing on which you can depend is:
He sure knew who a boy’s best friend is.
Small wonder that producers of The Ed Sullivan Show once told him, “If you ever have anything we can use, let us know.”
But Lehrer’s public voice was largely stilled when the liberal consensus he had both mocked and counted on for laughs curdled in the horrors of Vietnam and Watergate, and social and sexual nonconformity became the norm. Or, as he put it, “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” emphasizing to me in an interview more than 20 years ago that this observation depended on the word “awarded” for its sting, since Kissinger could not properly be said to have “won” anything.
With the exception of an occasional appearance at tribute functions, or promotional interviews for a 2000 boxed album of his collected works, he became not so much a recluse as a still more private version of the private person he had always been since he first went to Harvard as the precocious 15-year-old son of a New York tie manufacturer. He was, in that quaint old phrase, “a lifelong bachelor.” But he wasn’t a hermit. Well into his 80s, he joined close friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for an annual holiday musical evening at the home of his neighbor, Dorothy Zinberg, a sociologist and longtime member of the Harvard Kennedy School faculty who died in 2020.
“Every Thanksgiving would end with Tom sitting at the piano, and I don’t remember him ever playing any of his own songs,” Zinberg’s nephew David Shore recalled. “He loved to play the American Songbook. He would sit at the piano and we would all sing. This went on for decades until about 10 or 15 years ago, when he became fairly deaf and it was more difficult to get him to the piano.” One extraordinary evening—not at Thanksgiving—the small group that heard Lehrer cycle through his Top 100 list of songs included Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer.
Louise Grunwald, the New York society doyenne, was Lehrer’s stepsister for a time in the 1950s (her mother married his father after his parents divorced), and she told me he was every bit as funny in everyday life as he was in his work, though it was “in a very subtle way—he wasn’t ‘comedian funny,’ if you know what I mean. He was a wonderful man.”
Years ago, Lehrer said that he had encouraged rumors that he was dead in hopes it would cut down on his junk mail, but “it didn’t.” When I caught up with him at the turn of the last millennium in Santa Cruz, California—where for many years he taught winter-term classes in musical theater and math for non-math students at the University of California, Santa Cruz—he made it clear he had no interest “in revealing to total strangers anything about me.”
That didn’t stop generation after generation of total strangers from embracing his irresistible oeuvre. (Lehrer’s appeal to successive waves of young people was surely not hurt by his claim, as a soldier in army intelligence, to have invented the vodka Jell-O shot to get around army alcohol restrictions.) In my own case, the epiphany was my discovery of the 10-inch LP of his original 22-minute Songs by Tom Lehrer, with a caricature of him as the devil at a piano keyboard—a contraband relic from my parents’ college days when, they told me, possession of it could be grounds for discipline. I played it till it practically melted. One sample, from “Be Prepared,” his hymn to the wonders of Scouting:
If you’re looking for adventure of a new and different kind,
And you come across a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined,
Don’t be nervous, don’t be flustered, don’t be scared.
Be prepared!
Eventually he played at nightclubs such as Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip in L.A. (where he was hired by George Schlatter, later the creator of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In) and the Blue Angel in Manhattan (where he shared the bill with an unknown Johnny Mathis). Still later came appearances at Carnegie Hall and the hungry i in San Francisco, but by 1960 he was tired of the drill and attempted to retire from performing and concentrate instead on the math Ph.D. he’d never quite finished.
Then in 1964, in what amounted to the second phase of his career, he contributed songs to the NBC television show That Was the Week That Was (“Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “Pollution”), which led to a new album and another round of live concert appearances around the world. But this phase, too, ran its course, and there was another hiatus until he popped up again with nonpolitical, non-topical songs for The Electric Company in 1971, his third act. And then he just pretty much stopped, period.
In 1980, a young British theatrical producer named Cameron Mackintosh persuaded Lehrer to allow the creation of Tomfoolery, a revue of his work, which prompted yet another renaissance and re-discovery. Mackintosh would soon go on to much bigger things, and at a 1998 tribute to the producer, Lehrer was introduced by his onetime childhood campmate, Stephen Sondheim. Lehrer noted of Mackintosh, “All I can say is that after Tomfoolery came Cats, and the combined profits of Cats and Tomfoolery made him a wealthy man.”
In an online Q&A in a Rhino Records chat room in 1997, Lehrer said that the comic voices that still made him laugh out loud included Monty Python, Mel Brooks, The Simpsons, Bob and Ray, and Nichols and May, but that stand-ups didn’t really do it for him. That’s perhaps not surprising, since Lehrer’s own brand of humor depended not on one-liners but on a certain knowingness about art and literature and the ways of the world.
For years, his e-mail address was a condensation of the words “living legend.” When I described him as “elfin” in a profile in The New York Times, he wrote me a sweet note signed, “Your elfin friend.”
One upside of Lehrer’s premature retreat from the spotlight is that he was spared a Fat Elvis phase. Like J.F.K. in politics or Cary Grant in the movies, he remains preserved in his impish, anarchic prime. While still in his 20s, he was unsentimental enough about the ravages of age to compose what amounts to a fitting epitaph for himself, though not for the enduring laughter he’s left behind:
Your teeth will start to go, dear,
Your waist will start to spread.
In twenty years or so, dear,
I’ll wish that you were dead.
I’ll never love you then at all
The way I do today.
So please remember,
When I leave in December,
I told you so in May.
Todd S. Purdum is the author of several books, most recently Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television
