Where’s Tom Lehrer?
[Hat tip: “Gringo.”]
Here’s an update on Tom Lehrer, that bitingly sarcastic troubadour of the 50s and 60s. But because he’s a reclusive sort, the article really doesn’t have all that much to say except that at 85 he’s alive and well and living in Santa Cruz and Cambridge.
If you read my previous piece on Lehrer, which is based in part on an interview he gave in 2003 to a Sydney newspaper, you’ll see that at least at that point he had gone somewhat off the deep end with Bush Derangement Syndrome. Now perhaps, with the Obama presidency, Lehrer is a bit mellower—although “mellow” seems hardly the right adjective for a man whose songs skewered almost everything and everybody.
As a minor Lehrer expert—I know almost all his songs by heart, having memorized them in my tender formative years—I have to say that one of the reasons Lehrer was so effective was that he wrote during a time when we still retained our ability to be shocked. His songs worked in part because they were so subversively funny, but it was much easier back then to push against conventional propriety.
Lehrer was a cynic with a built-in smirk to his voice. Even his tinkly piano-playing seemed to have an overlay of cynicism, although it’s hard to understand exactly how that was done. In trying to think of a song of his to post here as an example, I find an embarrassment of riches—or maybe just an embarrassment, because Lehrer’s not for everyone and is still remarkably offensive. But I especially admire the rhymes in the lengthy bridge of this one:
but it was much easier back then to push against conventional propriety.
I think G.B. Shaw was much the same. In Victorian, Edwardian times he could make fun of convention and accepted thought, but when it came to the twentieth century, with war, mass murder, fascism and militant communism, he was simply inadequate to the task. I don’t think it was merely that he was too old.
Orwell says somewhere something along the lines that the play Richard III could no longer be considered as over the top exaggeration, but had taken on the force of realism. I don’t think Shaw could identify with that.
Much of what you describe about this man represents much of what I reject of my mother’s attitudes and, what, peer social ideals? Oh, sure, I can’t fully understand aspects of the feelings, not having been there, but I am more than adult, mature, educated, at this point, to know what I don’t like about what I see.
It is difficult for me to not have anger about it, often. It’s the attitude that said she, they, you all, could do whatever you wanted. And you did. To the infanticide of my generation. My peers simply don’t exist so that a whole generation could party like they were still in college or high school. It’ll cost your generation more than no way to deal with entitlement problems and a destroyed nation, though, I think. Just as there are things worse than death. Will all of you pay? How much of our blood is on any one of your hands directly and indirectly?
I know. A strong reaction for a seemingly simple act, schtick. But it optimizes the notions, at least as I see them. And it isn’t like only ten of us were kept from existing. What of us weren’t aborted as a resort were simply, more quietly, denied existence in the first place. Two and a half children? Really? Uhrm, thanks. Yeah, this is going to come back to haunt.
Lehrer was a statistics lecturer at Harvard when I was in college. A friend took one of his courses there under some sort of cooperative program.
He reported back that Lehrer was as soporific and dry as a lecturer, as he was lively and witty as an entertainer.
Not a shock, actually. And so it goes . . .
I do recall some of his songs fondly, but not all. IIRC, and as you said, pretty much and equal-opportunity offender.
It was startling then.
“Lobatchevsy” always works for me. Clever and with some real history. His music/wit is appreciated and amuses more than one generation in my household.
I admired his deliberate impertinence, even if I disagreed with what he said. Good memories.
Never date a comedian, folks.
One I used to date took our breakup badly, and sang “The Masochism Tango” to me during his nightclub act: on his knees at our table.
The really ugly thing? he had been cruel to me, not vice versa. I still see him on the tube at times, playing character parts or in a national commercial.
I did think it was funny that Lehrer said, re marriage, “I couldn’t sit through all of Nicholas Nickleby, let alone a marriage.”
That’s sounds like an excellent decision, and one that spared someone else pain.
Neo:
On the contrary – there is a lot of satirical opportunity in the false shock and self-righteous umbrage of political correctness.
Another poster mentioned Shaw – I think he’d take swimmingly to skewering modern utopian do-gooders.
Ben David: I didn’t mean to imply that there were no opportunities for satire these days.
But satire that depends in any large part on shock value is more difficult now—one has to go to greater extremes. Lehrer wrote in different times.
Believe it or not, till this very moment, I had never even heard of Lehrer. Now, I can fully appreciate his obvious talent and his sarcastic whit tickles my funny-bone.
Yet at the same time, Lehrer’s cynicism is revealing of the disappointed idealism that mistakenly concludes that human fallibility is conclusive evidence that ideals themselves are mere illusion.
Lehrer attended the same high school I did, about 20 years earlier. Once the students tried to invite him back to speak and he replied, “It never seems to be on my way to anywhere”.
Like Neo, I memorized Tom Lehrer’s songs during my childhood years. Humor is often dated, especially humor based on current social or political topics. What amazes me about Tom Lehrer’s songs is how they are often still relevant in our society a half century after they were written.
The Folk Song Army skewers the self-righteous if “well-intentioned” left as well today as it did in 1965. As I was one of The Folk Song Army back then, I didn’t appreciate the song as much then as I did now.
A Christmas Carol describes “Christmas as we celebrate it in the United States” as well today as it did in the 1950s.
Your post prompted me to get out my set of Tom Lehrer’s records again. I have enjoyed his humor through more than half a century–from when I first saw him in a very small night club in the late 1950s until now, from when I was a liberal until now a conservative. He poked fun at liberals and conservatives alike. The only song that ever bothered me, then and now, is ‘The Vatican Rag’. Even back when I was an atheist, it seemed a bit offensive to me.
Tom Lehrer, Monty Python, Douglas Adams, MAD Magazine… and the rest of those hip, trendy folks who made their careers out of slaughtering every sacred cow.
It looked so good at the time. “Speaking truth to power,” such a great ideal. The only trouble is, they were a man sitting on a branch of a tree sawing that branch off. And they did saw it off successfully. They’re a window into the West’s decline, and the reason why those who do still hold to their own sacred cows–some of them ferociously and violently, such as the Muslims–are gaining the upper hand over those who have abandoned all that used to be sacred to them.
Those satirists weren’t all Marxists. But, they were an important tool, an essential level-smoother, for the Marxists to get their way. And when this is accomplished, the Marxist or Islamic “utopia” has no use for the satirists. They have new sacred cows, and the Marxists at least are clever enough to forbid the slaughter of those sacred cows in the name of… diversity and tolerance.
Court jesters are needed from time to time, but if you don’t hold them with a leash of opprobrium when they take liberties with your core values, disaster will ensue. It’s in plain sight now.
Lehrer as a person, as a dry and uninspiring statistician, is a much different persona from the inventive wordsmith we hear in “Old and Gray”.
I appreciate his verbal cleverness now as much as 50 yrs ago.
It is a mistake to imbue the songsmith with the attributes of the song. That I admire the cleverness of his lyrical constructs does not mean that I must agree with its conclusions (December…May), nor do I project my admiration for his clever songwriting onto the man himself. That is why we now have Angelina Jolie appearing at the G-8 summit. Bizarre.
Always loved his line:
“Remember the war against Franco.
That’s where each one of us belong.
Though he may have won all the battles.
We had all the good songs.”
Just four lines tell you much about the 60’s left.
After listening to several more I must say that while it never occurred to me to memorize them I seem to know them extremely well. Funnily enough I don’t think I ever much agreed with him but thoroughly enjoyed his wit – which is remarkably reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan. I was never in the slightest offended by the Vatican Rag even though I was a Roman Catholic. Well, as my dad put it we were ‘Harvard Catholics’ if you take my meaning. While I delighted in his song about Werner von Braun I always knew it was quite unfair. You can see just how verbally adroit he was separate from his usual skewed point of view in his Elements song, which except for a swipe at Harvard at the end is politically neutral.
‘Poisoning pigeons in the park’ still makes me laugh out loud.
Douglas Adams enabling Marxism? Monty Python as a “window into the West’s decline”?
See, now this is why liberals think you conservatives have no sense of humor.