Meanwhile in HarvarD...
TOM LEHRER AND PARODY SONGS
(EASTER EGG EXHIBIT)
Tom Andrew Lehrer, born in Manhattan in 1928, is known for three things - the significance of his parody songs, the brevity of his comedic career and (perhaps less relevantly here) the invention of the vodka Jell-O shot. Throughout his childhood, he pursued maths and piano, enrolling at Harvard University at the age of just 15 to study the former.
"[My enrolment at a young age] was because of what we called ‘The War’... WWII. Everybody over eighteen was drafted. So, many of us were young. They were very happy to get any warm body that would pay tuition...Math was wonderful... I was through with my work by noon." - Tom Lehrer [source]
Two years into his degree, he became a campus legend after writing the satirical song 'Fight Fiercely, Harvard!', which mocked the university American football team and subsequently displeased Harvard's highers-up.
"...it amazes me that anyone would think a song making fun of the football team was grounds for expulsion." Tom Lehrer [source]
Nonetheless, Lehrer received B.A. and A.M. degrees from Harvard, and began a teaching career, all while developing more comedy music. The university's physics department in 1951/1952 saw his performance of The Physical Revue, named after the homophonically equivalent scientific journal and consisting of a selection of STEM-themed songs. This included his most famous work - 'The Elements Song', which lists the periodic table to the tune of the 'Modern Major General's Song' from The Pirates of Penzance. Indeed, Gilbert and Sullivan were major inspirations for Lehrer when growing up.
"We had an album of highlights from Gilbert and Sullivan that I played constantly, an album of 78s, of course, which meant that you had to constantly lift the needle up and put it back down again." - Tom Lehrer [source]
Another melody from the Revue was 'Lobachevsky', an ode to academic plagiarism and its potential benefits.
"Some of Lehrer’s best songs are about math and science — …'The Elements' and 'Lobachevsky' are as funny, and educational, now as they were 50 years ago, and heralded the rise of cultural touchstones like Sesame Street." - Ben Smith and Anita Badejo, Buzzfeed News [source]
The Physical Revue's success led Lehrer performing stints at Boston nightclubs and, by January 1953, he had collated enough songs of quality to put together a 22 minute LP - Songs by Tom Lehrer. When the initial 400 copy run sold out in a couple of days. Lehrer began distributing the records via mail order (hiring Harvard freshmen to help with packing) and word soon spread, first to other college towns, then beyond. By the following year, he'd sold 10,000 copies.
"I didn’t push it, I didn’t advertise it, and I didn’t play it on the radio. The word just spread. You couldn’t do that today." - Tom Lehrer [source]
Record sales continued over the period between 1955 and 1957, during which Lehrer was drafted to work for the N.S.A. On his return to civilian life, he soon began touring the U.S.A. and, in 1959, the U.K.. This year also saw Time declaring him a 'sicknik' - one of a generation of performers which used pithy, satirical and (at the time) shocking humour.
"What the sickniks dispense is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world. ...Among them: Tom Lehrer, 31, onetime Harvard mathematics instructor and still the college boy's delight..." - Time, 1959 [source
"My attitude was, ‘How could you people be so sick as to like these songs.’ Remember – I was the clean-cut kid with the bow tie and the big smile, so I could get away with it. Basically, I’m not saying these songs are funny – you’re the one who is laughing!" - Tom Lehrer [source]
Tom Lehrer's liberal leanings were often apparent in his songs. His darkly humoured commentary on the prospect of nuclear annihilation, 'We Will All Go Together When We Go', would eventually lend its name to a side-quest in 2010's apocalypse-themed video game Fallout New Vegas.
By 1959, Lehrer began to tire of a lifestyle of performance - not that he was cynical of his work, but simply resolute in his conviction that this chapter of his life was over. He has since attributed the possible moment of revelation to one performance of 'Fight Fiercely', the song that initially catalysed his rise to notoriety.
"The performance had been on automatic pilot, and I had been thinking about what I was going to have for dinner afterwards or something like that, so I thought, ‘OK, the time has come." - Tom Lehrer [source]
With a cessation of U.S. tours in 1960, he realigned his focus back to teaching and studying at Harvard, MIT and Santa Cruz. However, he continued writing comedy music, most prominently for the satirical television show That Was The Week That Was - an American adaption of a British programme born out of the same 'satire boom' as Beyond The Fringe. The subsequent 1965 album of Lehrer's contributions, That Was The Year That Was, was a gradual success, eventually going gold after 31 years. Many of his most famous songs would also go on to populate the 1980 West End play Tomfoolery, produced by Cameron Mackintosh.
However, with the complex cultural shifts of the 1960s and beyond, he has found it increasingly difficult to write songs with both humour and meaningful satirical substance. The straightforward political landscape that many white American men experienced throughout the '50s was becoming extinct - Lehrer found himself somewhat left behind by the directions of discourse across the political spectrum.
"Lehrer was a hero of the anti-nuclear, civil rights left; he occupied the bleeding edge of the elite liberalism of the day... But his left was the square, suit-wearing, high-culture left...What was coming was the New Left and the counterculture, something whose aesthetics Lehrer couldn’t stand, even if their politics weren't necessarily at odds." - Ben Smith and Anita Badejo, Buzzfeed News, 2014 [source]
"I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them. And that's not funny. OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire." - Tom Lehrer [source]
"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize." - Tom Lehrer [source]
While Tom Lehrer's actual repertoire is limited in scale (given the short period over which it was produced), it had a huge influence on the genre of musical comedy - 'Weird Al' Yankovic and Randy Newman have publicly praised Lehrer as an important inspiration for their work, while Sir Martin Gilbert has been quoted as saying that he was one of the 10 great figures of the entire 20th century.
"Lehrer was able to express and to expose, in humorous verse and lilting music, some of the most powerful dangers of the second half of the century ...Many of the causes of which Lehrer sang became, three decades later, part of the main creative impulse of mankind." - Sir Martin Gilbert [source]
His upbeat melodies contrast and thus accentuate the satirical or sardonic edge. His musical rhythms act as an ideal framework for the timing of his brand of humour. Most likely, though, the greatest asset of Lehrer's comedy is the accessibility, familiarity and replicability of its format - simply a person at a piano, singing an tune. The approach lends itself to inspiring others and progressing the artform. In the summer of 2008, piano comedian Bo Burnham wrote the song 'New Math' as a reflection of Lehrer's body of work - thirteen years later, he won a Peabody Award for his cuttingly insightful musical special Inside.
In 2022, Tom Lehrer relinquished the copyright of all his songs to the public domain. How a new generation of artists will use them, excitingly, remains to be seen.
"If you get hooked on Tom Lehrer as a kid, it’s not because you think he might be a sweet old man. It’s because beneath the cheerful tunes is an edge, a sheer nastiness and even sadism, that kids have always loved." - Ben Smith and Anita Badejo, Buzzfeed News, 2014 [source]
"There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections." - Tom Lehrer [source]
Pictured - Tom Lehrer, circa 1957.
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