Tom Lehrer’s Best Bits
Mathematician and musical satirist Tom Lehrer passed away on July 26 at the age of 97. Although he spent most of his life out of the limelight, preferring to teach rather than perform, he is beloved for his darkly humorous lyrics, often on political or social topics, set to incongruously cheerful melodies. Read on for a brief biography and a selection of some of his best songs.
Tom Lehrer (1928–2025) was a precocious child, excelling in both music and math from a young age. He began piano lessons at age seven but never took to the classical pieces his teacher assigned. Instead, he convinced his mother to find him an instructor who would teach him the Broadway songs he loved so much. After graduating from high school at the age of 15, he went on to study at Harvard, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at age 18 and then a master’s the following year. While at Harvard, he entertained himself and others by writing and performing satirical songs. These often poked fun at Harvard traditions and college life, including the football song parody “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” in 1945.
Although he did not want to abandon his research and teaching, his friends convinced him to cut an album, Songs by Tom Lehrer, in 1953. Given his often salacious and topical lyrics, no record company would touch him, so he produced the album himself, initially cutting 400 copies. “My songs spread slowly,” Lehrer once said, “Like herpes, rather than Ebola.” He kept having to go back and make more pressings. Eventually, the album sold about half a million copies.
One song on the album is “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be,” which he wrote in 1952 while preparing for a short stint as a researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The song blithely captures society’s anxieties at the time regarding nuclear warfare and surveillance with the lines, “How I long to see the mushroom clouds / ’Mid the yuccas and the thistles / I’ll watch the guided missiles / While the old FBI watches me.”
The album’s success led to gigs in nightclubs across the country. After a two-year stint in the army, he returned with a follow-up album, More of Tom Lehrer, and a live version of the album, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, in 1959. Songs on this album included the wickedly dark “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Masochism Tango.”
While he wrote many of his own melodies, he did sometimes borrow existing tunes, often by Arthur Sullivan. The most famous of these is “The Elements,” which lists all the elements of the periodic table, set to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance.
He toured for another year before deciding to give up performing in favor of a humbler life in higher education. He was never drawn to the limelight and did not harbor a love of performing; teaching was his calling. For the rest of his career, he taught mathematics at Harvard and MIT and mathematics and musical theater history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Although he stopped performing publicly, he continued to write songs on occasion, notably for the satirical television show The Week That Was in 1964–1965. This led to the album That Was the Year That Was, which included some of his most politically charged songs. One of these was the highly controversial song “The Vatican Rag,” written in response to the decisions of the Second Vatican Council.
Although it was not his main reason for hanging up his songwriting hat, the Vietnam War apparently changed his relationship with political satire. As he said, “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Despite his relatively short musical career, Lehrer’s songs have remained a fixture of American culture. In a selfless act, he ensured they would find a life after his death by relinquishing the rights to his lyrics and original songs in October 2020, opening them up to the public domain. You can find these on his website, tomlehrersongs.com.
