Tom Lehrer

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Friends, Tom Lehrer is still alive. Now, there’s a relatively recent revue called Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and He Doesn’t Want to Talk to You, which does appear to be true. He’s old, and he was never much into being a public figure when he was young, and he has only done a handful of performances since 1972, when he did a concert fundraising for George McGovern. One of those performances was in front of Queen Elizabeth II, who is herself now dead. He’s not terribly interested in it. He’s actually retired from teaching math, too, having delivered a final lecture—on the subject of infinity, appropriately enough—in 2001. And if I’d gone to UC Santa Cruz, I could’ve met him!

He was born into a secular Jewish family on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His mother put him into piano lessons, starting him on classical and eventually giving up and letting him learn a more popular style. He went to summer camp in Maine with some kid named Stephen Sondheim; they didn’t stay in contact and wouldn’t connect again for decades. He entered Harvard at age fifteen, studying mathematics, but he also made a name for himself with “Fight Fiercely, Harvard.” He got an MA, also at Harvard, then entered the doctoral program, from which he never quite graduated.

Now, part of that was spending some time as a researcher at Los Alamos. And he was drafted in 1957, wherein he was a Specialist Third Class. And in fact the Los Alamos thing might not be true, because he served his Army time working for the NSA, which he didn’t reveal until 2020. The NSA, long referred to as “No Such Agency,” was so top secret that Lehrer himself said that nuclear weapons made a cover story for what he was actually working on. Still, it took until 1965 before Lehrer seems to have acknowledged to himself that he wasn’t getting that PhD. Wikipedia tells us what it was in, but that doesn’t mean I understand.

He’d started out writing songs for just himself. Then to amuse his friends. Then he started doing nightclub performances. Then he self-produced an album which sold for the adjusted-for-inflation price of about $35. Not only did they sell out, he started getting orders from as far away as San Francisco. He did more concerts, and recorded more albums, and ended up touring Europe. He became huge in the UK when it was mentioned almost in passing that Princess Margaret was a fan of his; people had to buy the album to hear it, because ten of its twelve songs were banned by the BBC.

Then, he was hired by the American version of That Was the Week That Was, which was apparently not a great experience for him. His songs were sung by Nancy Ames, and some of his lyrics were changed.

He did, on the other hand, record an album wherein he performed his own songs, recorded at the Hungry I nightclub. It’s only one of several fairly impressive performances there, and in fact one of several albums recorded there. He worked on The Frost Report. This is the era in which we get the more pointed of his songs, about stuff in the present day.

He performed live on Danish television, a performance available on DVD that was, he said, revenge for Victor Borge. In 1971, he signed on to the new PBS show The Electric Company, writing ten songs for it on the subject of things like grammar. In short, he had gone from “math professor who sings songs in class” to “pop culture phenomenon.” Mostly through his own efforts; he still technically had a recording label at the time. He made one of those weird promotional videos, his for Dodge, which as of this writing is available on YouTube—more on which anon. He contemplated writing a Sweeney Todd musical with Electric Company colleague Joe Raposo in which Jerry Colonna would play the title role, but he procrastinated and his old campmate beat him to it.

And then he stopped. He taught math. He taught musical theatre. And the albums kept selling. Cameron Mackintosh created a revue that Lehrer wasn’t involved in but approved. He wrote a song about the proving of Fermat’s Last Theorem, because he basically had to. He did a few performances celebrating Cameron Mackintosh, one of which Queen Elizabeth II attended, and that was it. He said he didn’t have any urge to write more songs, and he wasn’t interested in performing, so he didn’t. It’s hard to argue with, really.

In 2008, he had an off-the-record talk with a reporter where the only thing he said on the record was that he was voting for Obama. When rapper 2Chainz asked to sample “The Old Dope Peddler,” he gave permission and asked his regards sent to “Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?” He isn’t interested in satirizing modern problems because he feels they need obliteration instead of mere satirization; see also the epigraph. He never married, he says because his attention span is too short, and honestly that’s about as much of his life beyond teaching and music that I know or that he wants us to.

Then, in October 2020, he relinquished his rights into the public domain. In November 2022, he topped that and instituted a website with all of his recordings available for download. It says it will be taken down “in the not too distant future,” but it’s there as I write this. Enjoy; download what you want. He specifically asks you not to send him money. One assumes he doesn’t really have heirs he’s worried about, and at this point you figure there’s not a ton of old age left to worry about. Which is why I shuffled the schedule when I decided I should’ve written about him ages ago.