Tom Lehrer, RIP: Hear All of His Witty, Satirical Songs in One Playlist

Tom Lehrer died last week­end, more than four decades after rumors of his death had first gone into cir­cu­la­tion. He did­n’t both­er to con­tra­dict them, pub­licly claim­ing that he fig­ured they would “cut down on the junk mail.” That quip proved not just that he was still alive, but that his wit was intact. And it was his wit, com­bined with a facil­i­ty on the piano, that made him famous: mer­ci­less­ly sat­i­riz­ing every­thing from the Boy Scouts to Har­vard, his alma mater, to New Math to Vat­i­can II to World War III, his live­ly show-tune pas­tich­es became defin­ing pieces of Cold War-era com­e­dy — or in any case, defin­ing pieces of ear­ly Cold War-era com­e­dy.

A pro­fes­sor of math­e­mat­ics for most of his career, he per­formed and record­ed music most­ly in the nine­teen-fifties and six­ties, begin­ning with his first con­cert, giv­en as a grad­u­ate stu­dent in 1950, and end­ing with anoth­er in Copen­hagen in 1967.

There was also an ear­ly-sev­en­ties coda in the form of a few songs writ­ten for PBS’ chil­dren’s show The Elec­tric Com­pa­ny and a per­for­mance at a George S. McGov­ern ral­ly. But by then, the frame of Amer­i­can cul­ture had shift­ed. “The Viet­nam War is what changed it,” Lehrer said in 1981. “Every­body got earnest. My pur­pose was to make peo­ple laugh and not applaud. If the audi­ence applauds, they’re just show­ing they agree with me”: an obser­va­tion today’s would-be satirists would do well to bear in mind.

Whether or not you have any aspi­ra­tions of your own in that tra­di­tion, you can lis­ten through the entire­ty of Lehrer’s record­ed work in the YouTube playlist above and under­stand why his com­ic star burned so bright­ly — and, through the near­ly six­ty years that have fol­lowed, nev­er quite burned out. Though clear­ly writ­ten in the spir­it of Eisen­how­er-era lib­er­al­ism, these songs (released by their author into the pub­lic domain a few years ago) don’t shy away from the absur­di­ties of what Lehrer him­self would not, with a straight face, be able to call the human con­di­tion. First test­ed out on cam­pus, they also devel­oped an ear­ly form of what we’ve come to think of as the “col­lege” sen­si­bil­i­ty in pop­u­lar music. In some sense, Lehrer nev­er left that way of see­ing the world behind — nor, like a true stu­dent, did he ever get around to fin­ish­ing his Ph.D.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Tom Lehrer Releas­es His All of Catchy and Sav­age Musi­cal Satire Into the Pub­lic Domain

Tom Lehrer’s Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly and Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Inclined Singing and Song­writ­ing, Ani­mat­ed

Hear Tom Lehrer Sing the Names of 102 Chem­i­cal Ele­ments to the Tune of Gilbert & Sul­li­van

Cel­e­brate Har­ry Potter’s Birth­day with Song. Daniel Rad­cliffe Sings Tom Lehrer’s Tune “The Ele­ments”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.