LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tom Lehrer, the favored and erudite track satirist who lampooned marriage, politics, racism and the Chilly Battle, then largely deserted his music profession to return to educating math at Harvard and different universities, has died. He was 97.
Longtime buddy David Herder stated Lehrer died Saturday at his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He didn’t specify a reason behind demise.
Lehrer had remained on the maths school of the College of California at Santa Cruz effectively into his late 70s. In 2020, he even turned away from his personal copyright, granting the general public permission to make use of his lyrics in any format with none payment in return.
A Harvard prodigy (he had earned a math diploma from the establishment at age 18), Lehrer quickly turned his very sharp thoughts to previous traditions and present occasions. His songs included “Poisoning Pigeons within the Park,” “The Outdated Dope Peddler” (set to a tune harking back to “The Outdated Lamplighter”), “Be Ready” (by which he mocked the Boy Scouts) and “The Vatican Rag,” by which Lehrer, an atheist, poked on the rites and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church. (Pattern lyrics: “Get down in your knees, fiddle along with your rosaries. Bow your head with nice respect, and genuflect, genuflect, genuflect.”)
Accompanying himself on piano, he carried out the songs in a colourful fashion harking back to such musical heroes as Gilbert and Sullivan and Stephen Sondheim, the latter a lifelong buddy. Lehrer was usually likened to such contemporaries as Allen Sherman and Stan Freberg for his comedian riffs on tradition and politics and he was cited by Randy Newman and “Bizarre Al” Jankovic amongst others as an affect.
He mocked the types of music he didn’t like (fashionable folks songs, rock ‘n’ roll and fashionable jazz), laughed at the specter of nuclear annihilation and denounced discrimination.
However he attacked in such an erudite, even well mannered, method that just about nobody objected.
“Tom Lehrer is probably the most sensible track satirist ever recorded,” musicologist Barry Hansen as soon as stated. Hansen co-produced the 2000 boxed set of Lehrer’s songs, “The Stays of Tom Lehrer,” and had featured Lehrer’s music for many years on his syndicated “Dr. Demento” radio present.
Lehrer’s physique of labor was truly fairly small, amounting to about three dozen songs.
“After I bought a humorous thought for a track, I wrote it. And if I didn’t, I didn’t,” Lehrer instructed The Related Press in 2000 throughout a uncommon interview. “I wasn’t like an actual author who would sit down and put a bit of paper within the typewriter. And once I give up writing, I simply give up. … It wasn’t like I had author’s block.”
He’d gotten into performing by chance when he started to compose songs within the early Fifties to amuse his associates. Quickly he was performing them at coffeehouses round Cambridge, Massachusetts, whereas he remained at Harvard to show and procure a grasp’s diploma in math.
He reduce his first report in 1953, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” which included “I Wanna Go Again to Dixie,” lampooning the attitudes of the Outdated South, and the “Struggle Fiercely, Harvard,” suggesting how a prissy Harvard blueblood may sing a soccer combat track.
After a two-year stint within the Military, Lehrer started to carry out live shows of his materials in venues around the globe. In 1959, he launched one other LP known as “Extra of Tom Lehrer” and a stay recording known as “An Night Wasted with Tom Lehrer,” nominated for a Grammy for finest comedy efficiency (musical) in 1960.
However across the identical time, he largely give up touring and returned to educating math, although he did some writing and acting on the facet.
Lehrer stated he was by no means snug showing in public.
“I loved it up to some extent,” he instructed The AP in 2000. “However to me, going out and performing the live performance each evening when it was all obtainable on report could be like a novelist going out and studying his novel each evening.”
He did produce a political satire track every week for the 1964 tv present “That Was the Week That Was,” a groundbreaking topical comedy present that anticipated “Saturday Evening Reside” a decade later.
He launched the songs the next 12 months in an album titled “That Was the Yr That Was.” The fabric included “Who’s Subsequent?” that ponders which authorities would be the subsequent to get the nuclear bomb … maybe Alabama? (He didn’t want to inform his listeners that it was a bastion of segregation on the time.) “Air pollution” takes a have a look at the then-new idea that maybe rivers and lakes must be cleaned up.
He additionally wrote songs for the Seventies instructional youngsters’s present “The Electrical Firm.” He instructed AP in 2000 that listening to from individuals who had benefited from them gave him much more satisfaction than reward for any of his satirical works.
His songs have been revived within the 1980 musical revue “Tomfoolery” and he made a uncommon public look in London in 1998 at a celebration honoring that musical’s producer, Cameron Waterproof coat.
Lehrer was born in 1928, in New York Metropolis, the son of a profitable necktie designer. He recalled an idyllic childhood on Manhattan’s Higher West Facet that included attending Broadway reveals together with his household and strolling by means of Central Park day or evening.
After skipping two grades at school, he entered Harvard at 15 and, after receiving his grasp’s diploma, he spent a number of years unsuccessfully pursuing a doctorate.
“I spent many, a few years satisfying all the necessities, as a few years as doable, and I began on the thesis,” he as soon as stated. “However I simply needed to be a grad scholar, it’s an exquisite life. That’s what I needed to be, and sadly, you possibly can’t be a Ph.D. and a grad scholar on the identical time.”
He started to show part-time at Santa Cruz within the Seventies, primarily to flee the cruel New England winters.
Once in a while, he acknowledged, a scholar would enroll in certainly one of his lessons primarily based on data of his songs.
“However it’s an actual math class,” he stated on the time. “I don’t do any humorous theorems. So these individuals go away fairly rapidly.”
Former Related Press author John Rogers contributed to this story. Rogers retired from The AP in 2021.
