Tom Lehrer shut up far too early

Telegraph

6 days ago

Tom Lehrer died on Saturday, aged 97. His album That Was the Year That Was records a live performance, including his introductory stage backchat to his own songs. At one point, he says, 'It is a sobering thought…that, when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.'
Lehrer's own life prompts almost the opposite thought. That brilliant LP, which came out in 1965, contained the last new material he ever produced for the general public. Yet he lived for another six decades.
So even by the time that I, aged 12, had become an ardent fan of his work, Lehrer was already a thing of the past. He had won a place to study mathematics at Harvard aged only 15. After less than a decade of showbiz fame, he became a teacher at that great university. A few years after that, he forsook composing and performing satirical songs; he stayed on at Harvard for ever. I notice that none of his obituaries had anything to say about his maths classes. It is hard to imagine they were not funny.
Why did Lehrer stop singing? No doubt it was partly because he got sick of adulation and – he was always shy – of public performance. Perhaps he felt his best work was the product of his youth and could only decline with advancing years. As a mathematician, he knew that originality often does not last.
But I do wonder if his decision to stop also had something to do with cultural change. It related both to the precision of his wit and the openness of his mind.
As the Harvard connection suggests, Lehrer's work was of the kind which some would now call 'elitist'. The jokes were quick-fire, and contained many scientific, historical, musical and literary references. This from Smut, for example: 'I don't need no hobby, like tennis or philately. /I've got my hobby: re-reading Lady Chatterley.'
He often parodied other writers, composers or genres (Gilbert and Sullivan, Cole Porter, operatic arias, Irish ballads, jazz). One of his best songs New Math guys his own academic discipline ('It's so simple/ So very simple/ That only a child can do it!'). It was not essential to know the references he was making – most of the jokes stood up well in their own right – but it helped.
Lehrer's lyrics contained words not always in popular parlance. I remember being introduced to 'genuflect' for the first time in his The Vatican Rag, which satirises the Catholic Church's modernisation after Vatican II. Knowing a little theology was useful too: 'There the guy who's got religion'll/ Tell you if your sin's original.'
With this playful, almost donnish tone went the liberalism of the period. In Britain, comparable comedy, with comparable politics, also coming out of university (chiefly Cambridge), was the so-called Satire Boom, starting with Beyond the Fringe and ending with That Was The Week That Was (TW3).
Lehrer's New York Jewish background loved to mock the pomposity of old establishments, the bigotry of the Deep South, the early insouciance about the atom bomb and American sentimentality ('those super-special just plain folks/ In my hometown'). One of his few political jokes that failed the test of time was his little aside about the impossibility of an actor like Ronald Reagan becoming president.
Because Lehrer was genuinely liberal – in the proper sense of loving freedom – he never went in for Leftish self-righteousness. One of his best songs, about America's National Brotherhood Week, laughs at the very idea: 'Be nice to people who/ Are inferior to you./ It's only for a week, so have no fear./ Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!'
And The Folk Song Army skewers the sort of protest which became so popular in the United States in the Sixties about Vietnam and has recently had a second flowering (if that is the right word) about Gaza, Black Lives Matter etc. 'We are the folk song army./ Every one of us cares./ We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,/ Unlike the rest of you squares.'
One of its stanzas parodies, musically and verbally, the way folk songs disregard tight rules of scansion, rhythm or line length, 'The tune don't have to be clever/ And it don't matter if you put a couple extra syllables into a line./ It sounds more ethnic if it ain't good English/ And it don't even gotta rhyme (excuse me, rhyne).'
The song signs off with a rousing motto aimed at those who prefer words to action: 'Ready, aim, sing.' Perhaps Tom Lehrer feared that, if he went on much longer, that would be his motto too.
For more than half a century, we Lehrer fans have been lamenting his long silence, and discussing whether anything could persuade him to speak and sing once more. I had such a conversation, by chance, only the week before he died. But our discussions often ended by quoting approvingly a line from the man himself (again, I think, from That Was The Year That Was). 'There are a lot of plays around just now about people who can't communicate,' he says, 'Well, I feel that if people cannot communicate, the very least they can do is to SHUT UP.'
Amen to that. Our current culture is swamped by people who cannot communicate but do it all the same with tremendous pride and ill-founded self-confidence. They leave little room in the public square for a witty genius like Tom Lehrer.