Tom Lehrer

Musical Satirist

4.69/5 (13)

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“The real issues I don’t think most people touch.”

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Thomas Andrew Lehrer (born April 9, 1928) is an American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician. He has lectured on mathematics and musical theater. He is best known for the pithy, humorous songs he recorded in the 1950s and ’60s.

On this page you can read Tom Lehrer’s biography, view videos of his most famous songs including “The Vatican Rag”, “I Hold Your Hand in Mine”,  “We Will All Go Together When We Go”, “New Math”, “National Brotherhood Week”,  “Pollution”, “Send the Marines” and “Who’s Next?”, and see a complete list of all his songs in alphabetical order.

His songs often parodied popular musical forms, though he usually created original melodies when doing so.

A notable exception is “The Elements”, in which he set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the “Major-General’s Song” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance.

Lehrer’s early musical work typically dealt with the non-topical subject matter and was noted for its black humor in songs such as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”.

In the 1960s, he produced a number of songs that dealt with social and political issues of the day, particularly when he wrote for the U.S. version of the television show “That Was the Week That Was”.

The popularity of these songs has far outlasted their topical subjects and references. Lehrer quoted a friend’s explanation: “Always predict the worst and you’ll be hailed as a prophet.”

In the early 1970s, Lehrer largely retired from public performances to devote his time to teaching mathematics and musical theater history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Early Life

Lehrer was born to a Jewish family and grew up in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Although he was raised Jewish, Lehrer became an agnostic.

He began studying classical piano at the age of seven but was more interested in the popular music of the age. Eventually, his mother also sent him to a popular-music piano teacher.

At this early age, he began writing show tunes, which eventually helped him as a satirical composer and writer in his years of lecturing at Harvard University, and later at other universities.

Lehrer attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York, part of The Bronx. He also attended Camp Androscoggin, both as a camper and a counselor.

Writing songs at Harvard

Lehrer was considered a child prodigy and entered Harvard College at the age of 15 after graduating from Loomis Chaffee School.

As a mathematics undergraduate student at Harvard College, he began to write comic songs to entertain his friends, including “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” (1945).

Those songs were later named The Physical Revue, a joking reference to a leading scientific journal, The Physical Review.

He graduated Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from Harvard University, magna cum laude, in 1946. He received his AM degree the next year and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

He later taught mathematics and other classes at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Academic and military career

Lehrer remained in Harvard’s doctoral program for several years, taking time out for his musical career and to work as a researcher at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957, working at the National Security Agency (NSA).

(Lehrer has stated that he invented the Jello shot during this time, as a means of circumventing the base’s ban on alcoholic beverages.)

These experiences became fodder for songs, e.g., “Fight Fiercely, Harvard”, “The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be” and “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier”.

It was many years before Lehrer publicly revealed that he had been assigned to the NSA since the mere fact of its existence was classified at the time; this left him in the interesting position of implicitly using nuclear weapons work as a cover story for something more sensitive.

Despite holding a master’s degree in an era when American conscripts often lacked a high school diploma, Lehrer served as an enlisted soldier, achieving the rank of Specialist Third Class (later retitled “Specialist-4” and currently “Specialist”), which he described as being a “corporal without portfolio.”

In 1960, Lehrer returned to full-time studies at Harvard, but in 1965 gave up on his mathematical dissertation about the subject of modes in statistics, after working on it intermittently for 15 years.

From 1962, Lehrer taught in the political science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 1972, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, teaching an introductory course entitled “The Nature of Mathematics” to liberal arts majors—”Math for Tenors”, according to Lehrer.

He also taught a class in musical theater. He occasionally performed songs in his lectures, primarily those relating to the topic.

In 2001, Lehrer taught his last mathematics class (on the topic of infinity) and retired from academia. He has remained in the area, and in 2003 said he still “hangs out” around the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Musical career

Lehrer was mainly influenced by musical theater. According to Gerald Nachman’s book Seriously Funny, the Broadway musical Let’s Face It! (by Cole Porter) made an early and lasting impression on him.

Lehrer’s style consists of parodying various forms of popular songs. For example, his appreciation of list songs led him to write “The Elements”, which lists the periodic table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song”.

In author Isaac Asimov’s second autobiographical volume In Joy Still Felt, Asimov recounted seeing Lehrer perform in a Boston nightclub on October 9, 1954.

Lehrer sang cleverly about Jim getting it from Louise, and Sally from Jim, “…and after a while, you gathered the ‘it’ was venereal disease [the song was likely “I Got It From Sally” (in later versions “Agnes”)].

Suddenly, as the combinations grew more grotesque, you realized he was satirizing every known perversion without using a single naughty phrase. It was clearly unsingable (in those days) outside a nightclub.”

Asimov also recalled a song that dealt with the Boston subway system, making use of the stations leading into town from Harvard, observing that the local subject matter rendered the song useless for general distribution.

Lehrer subsequently granted Asimov permission to print the lyrics to the subway song in his book. “I haven’t gone to nightclubs often,” said Asimov, “but of all the times I have gone, it was on this occasion that I had by far the best time.”

The First Album

In 1953, inspired by the success of his performances, Lehrer paid $15 for some studio time to record Songs by Tom Lehrer. The initial pressing was 400 copies.

Radio stations would not air his songs because of his controversial subjects, so he sold the album on campus at Harvard for $3, equivalent to $29 in 2019, while “several stores near the Harvard campus sold it for $3.50, taking only a minimal markup as a kind of community service. Newsstands on campus sold it for the same price.”

After one summer, he started to receive mail orders from all parts of the country (as far away as San Francisco, after The Chronicle wrote an article on the record).

Interest in his recordings was spread by word of mouth; friends and supporters brought their records home and played them for their friends, who then also wanted a copy.

Lehrer later recalled, “Lacking exposure in the media, my songs spread slowly. Like herpes, rather than ebola.”

The album—which included the macabre “I Hold Your Hand in Mine”, the mildly risqué “Be Prepared”, and “Lobachevsky” (regarding plagiarizing mathematicians)—became a cult success via word of mouth, despite being self-published and without promotion.

The Second Album

Lehrer embarked on a series of concert tours and in 1959 recorded a second album, which was released in two versions: the songs were the same, but More of Tom Lehrer was studio-recorded while An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer was recorded live in concert. These albums included  “We Will All Go Together When We Go”.

Lehrer recalled the studio session for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”, which referred to the practice of controlling pigeons in Boston with strychnine-treated corn:

The copyist arrived at the last minute with the parts and passed them out to the band… And there was no title on it, and there were no lyrics.

And so they ran through it, “What a pleasant little waltz”…

And the engineer said, “‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,’ take one,” and the piano player said, “What?” and literally fell off the stool.

Breakthrough in the United Kingdom

Lehrer had a breakthrough in the United Kingdom on December 4, 1957, when the University of London awarded a doctor of music degree honoris causa to Princess Margaret, and the public orator, Professor J. R. Sutherland, said it was “in the full knowledge that the Princess is a connoisseur of music and a performer of skill and distinction, her taste being catholic, ranging from Mozart to the calypso and from opera to the songs of Miss Beatrice Lillie and Tom Lehrer.”

This prompted significant interest in Lehrer’s works and helped to secure distributors for his material in Britain.

It was there that his music achieved real popularity, as a result of the proliferation of university newspapers referring to the material, and the willingness of the BBC to play his songs on the radio, something that was a rarity in the United States.

By the end of the 1950s, Lehrer had sold 370,000 records.

In 1960, Lehrer essentially retired from touring in the US. In the early 1960s, he was employed as the resident songwriter for the U.S. edition of That Was The Week That Was (TW3), a satirical television show.

An increased proportion of his output became overtly political, or at least topical, on subjects such as education (“New Math”), the Second Vatican Council (“The Vatican Rag”, the tune based on the 1910 song the Spaghetti Rag), race relations (“National Brotherhood Week”), air and water pollution (“Pollution”), American militarism (“Send the Marines”), World War III “pre-nostalgia” (“So Long, Mom”, premiered by Steve Allen), and nuclear proliferation (“Who’s Next?” and “MLF Lullaby”).

He also wrote a song that famously satirized the alleged amorality of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who worked for Nazi Germany before working for the United States.

(“‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”)

Lehrer did not appear on the television show; vocalist Nancy Ames performed his songs, and network censors often altered his lyrics.

Lehrer later performed these songs on the album That Was The Year That Was (1965) at which point people could hear them the way that he intended.

In 1966, David Frost invited him to contribute some of his classic compositions to his BBC program The Frost Report.

The show was transmitted live, and he pre-recorded all his segments at one performance.

Lehrer was not featured in every edition, but his songs were featured in an appropriate part of each show.

At least two of his songs were not included on any of his LPs: a reworking of Noël Coward’s “That is the End of the News” (with some new lyrics) and a comic explanation of how Britain might adapt to the coming of decimal currency.

In 1960, Lehrer toured Australia and New Zealand, performing a total of 33 concerts to great acclaim.

Yet this occurred during a time in which he was “banned, censored, mentioned in several houses of parliament and threatened with arrest”, in his words.

In particular, “Be Prepared” drew advance resistance in Brisbane from the chief of police. He performed several unreleased songs in Australia, including “The Masochism Tango”.

In Denmark and Norway

Lehrer made a short tour in Norway and Denmark in 1967, where he performed some of the songs from the television program.

The performance in Oslo on September 10 was recorded on videotape and aired locally that autumn, and this program was released on DVD some 40 years later.

He performed as a prominent international guest at the Studenterforeningen (student association) in Copenhagen, which was televised, and he commented on stage that he might be America’s “revenge for Victor Borge”.

He performed original songs in a Dodge automobile industrial film distributed primarily to automobile dealers and shown at promotional events in 1967, set in a fictional American wild west town and titled The Dodge Rebellion Theatre presents Ballads For ’67.

He attempted to adapt Sweeney Todd as a Broadway musical, working with Joe Raposo, to star Jerry Colonna. They started a few songs but, as Lehrer noted, “Nothing ever came of it, and of course, twenty years later Stephen Sondheim beat me to the punch.”

The record deal with Reprise Records for That Was The Year That Was also gave Reprise distribution rights for his earlier recordings, as Lehrer wanted to wind up his own record imprint.

The Reprise issue of Songs by Tom Lehrer was a stereo re-recording. This version was not issued on CD, but the songs were issued on the live Tom Lehrer Revisited CD.

The live recording included bonus tracks “L-Y” and “Silent E”, two of the ten songs that he wrote for the PBS children’s educational series The Electric Company.

Lehrer later commented that worldwide sales of the recordings under Reprise surpassed 1.8 million units in 1996. That same year, That Was The Year That Was went gold.

The album liner notes promote his songs with self-deprecating humor, such as quoting a New York Times review from 1958: Mr. Lehrer’s muse is “not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.”

Retirement from Public Performance

In the 1970s, Lehrer concentrated on teaching mathematics and musical theater, although he also wrote ten songs for the educational children’s television show The Electric Company.

His last public performance took place in 1972, on a fundraising tour for Democratic US presidential candidate George McGovern.

There is a false rumor that Lehrer gave up political satire when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1973.

He did comment that awarding the prize to Kissinger made political satire obsolete, but has denied that he stopped creating satire as a form of protest, pointing out that he had not toured for several years previously.

Another mistaken belief is that he was sued for libel by Wernher von Braun, the subject of one of his songs, and forced to relinquish his royalties to von Braun. Lehrer denied this in a 2003 interview.

When asked about his reasons for abandoning his musical career in an interview in the book accompanying his CD box set, released in 2000, Lehrer cited a simple lack of interest, a disdain of touring, and the monotony of performing the same songs repeatedly.

He observed that when he was moved to write and perform songs, he did, and when he was not, he did not and that after a while he simply lost interest.

Even though Lehrer was “a hero of the anti-nuclear, civil rights left” and covered its political issues in many of his songs, and even though he shared the New Left’s opposition to the Vietnam War, and advocated for civil rights, he disliked the aesthetics of the counterculture of the 1960s and stopped performing as the movement gained momentum.

Lehrer’s musical career was relatively brief. He once mentioned that he performed a mere 109 shows and wrote 37 songs over 20 years. Nevertheless, he developed a significant following in the United States and abroad.

Revivals and discographic reissues

Cameron Mackintosh produced Tom Foolery in 1980, a revue of Lehrer’s songs that was a hit on the London stage.

Lehrer was not initially involved with the show, but he was pleased with it; he eventually gave the stage production his full support and updated several of his lyrics for the show.

Tom Foolery contained 27 songs and led to more than 200 productions, including an Off-Broadway production at the Village Gate which ran for 120 performances in 1981.

Lehrer made a rare TV appearance on BBC’s Parkinson show in conjunction with the Tom Foolery premiere in 1980 at the Criterion Theatre in London, where he sang “I Got It from Agnes”.

In 1993, he wrote “That’s Mathematics” for the closing credits to a Mathematical Sciences Research Institute video celebrating the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Lehrer performed in public on June 7 and 8, 1998 for the first time in 25 years at the Lyceum Theatre, London as part of the show Hey, Mr. Producer! celebrating the career of Cameron Mackintosh, who produced Tom Foolery.

The June 8 show was his only performance before Queen Elizabeth II. Lehrer sang “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and an updated version of the nuclear proliferation song “Who’s Next?”

The boxed CD set The Remains of Tom Lehrer was released in 2000 by Rhino Entertainment.

It included live and studio versions of his first two albums, That Was The Year That Was, the songs that he wrote for The Electric Company, and some previously unreleased material.

It was accompanied by a small hardbound book containing an introduction by Dr. Demento and lyrics for all the songs.

In 2010, Shout! Factory launched a reissue campaign making Lehrer’s long out of print albums available digitally.

The CD/DVD combo The Tom Lehrer Collection was also issued and included his best-known songs, plus a DVD featuring an Oslo concert.

Musical legacy

Sardonic composer Randy Newman said of Lehrer, “He’s one of the great American songwriters without a doubt, right up there with everybody, the top guys.

As a lyricist, as good as there’s been in the last half of the 20th century”.

Singer and comedian Dillie Keane has acknowledged Lehrer’s influence on her work.

Lehrer was praised by Dr. Demento as “the best musical satirist of the twentieth century.”

Other artists who cite Lehrer as an influence include “Weird Al” Yankovic, whose work generally addresses more popular and less technical or political subjects, and educator and scientist H. Paul Shuch, who tours under the stage name Dr. SETI, and calls himself “a cross between Carl Sagan and Tom Lehrer: He sings like Sagan and lectures like Lehrer.”

Lehrer has commented that he doubts his songs had any real effect on those not already critical of the establishment: “I don’t think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly.

It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted… I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.”

In 2003 he commented that his particular brand of political satire is more difficult in the modern world: “The real issues I don’t think most people touch.”

The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn’t ban land mines … 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 satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them.”

Lehrer has said of his musical career, “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.”