American musician and satirist Tom Lehrer dies aged 97
The singer died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as confirmed by his friend, David Herder to The New York Times.
The singer was a popular satirist in his early career and the inspiration behind other satirists, including Weird Al Yankovic.
Lehrer was a Harvard-trained mathematician and had teaching posts at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of California.
He had success in the music industry but spent much of his life pursuing a life in academia, never quitting his original role as a mathematician and just taking sabbaticals when needed.
In 1960, he stopped performing, before returning in 1965, and then leaving the industry for good in 1967.
In 2000, he spoke to the New York Times about his enduring success: 'When I made that first record, it was just to sell around Harvard.
'It never dawned on me that all these years later, well, I wrote 'Fight Fiercely, Harvard' in 1945 and the band plays it at half-times now, 55 years later.'
He added that despite his success, he was never interested in fame.
'I don't feel the need for anonymous affection,' he said. 'If they buy my records, I love that. But I don't think I need people in the dark applauding. It's nice to be reassured once in a while, but a real performer has to do it over and over again. I can't understand the Yul Brynner phenomenon, 'The King and I' night after night.'
'I'm not interested in promoting myself, or revealing to total strangers anything about me. That's not my job. More Trending
'I read some of these things with people who will tell you all about their abortions, and their affairs and their divorces and their nervous breakdowns and their parents, and why are they doing that? And I'm sure if you asked them how much money they made last year, they'd tell you it's none of your business.'
The singer was best known for his songs The Masochism Tango, Send the Marines, and The Hunting Song.
In Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, he detailed the birds' appetite for 'peanuts coated with cyanide' and in I Hold Your Hand in Mine, he sang about necrophilia, and in I Got It From Agnes, he spoke about catching a venereal disease.
His tune, The Elements, was a list of the chemical elements set to the tune of I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General from The Pirates of Penzance and popularised in The Big Bang Theory.
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The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘I'm hoping to be the world's youngest dirty old man': the wit of Tom Lehrer, by those who knew him
A reputation for wit is often a burden – people expect bon mots to drop constantly from your lips – but no one ever wore their reputation for wit more lightly than the great American singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer, who has died aged 97. Lehrer admirers all over the world know his witticisms from his concert recordings. '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 worthwhile,' he said. A doctor became a specialist, 'specialising in diseases of the rich'. And Lehrer reflected on protest singers: 'It takes a certain amount of courage to get in a coffee house or a college auditorium and come out in favour of the things that everybody else in the audience is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.' But Lehrer turned his back on fame and fortune in 1960, and after 1972 he spent most of his time teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His students and close friends say he was wonderfully funny, scattering witticisms like confetti. Most of them are lost, but I've retrieved a few unknown Lehrer anecdotes. In 1943, aged 15, Lehrer applied to go to Harvard, and was accepted because he was a mathematics prodigy. His application took the form of a poem, that finished: But although I detest Learning poems and the rest Of the things one must know to have 'culture', While each of my teachers Makes speeches like preachers And preys on my faults like a vulture I will leave movie thrillers And watch caterpillars Get born and pupated and larva'ed And I'll work like a slave And always behave And maybe I'll get into Harvard … During his study there, the art historian Paul Turner (now of Stanford University) remembers a group sitting on the bank of the Charles River singing songs about their home towns, such as Chicago. Turner complained there was no song about his home town of Schenectady. Lehrer replied that there was, and sang: 'The toe bone Schenectady the foot bone, the foot bone Schenectady the ankle bone…' In 1970, a British graduate student at Harvard asked for an interview. Lehrer was inclined to refuse, but agreed because it was the young man's ticket to a job in journalism in London. He told him he was now 'on that vague borderline between adolescence and senility. I'm hoping to hang on to go from the world's oldest adolescent to the world's youngest dirty old man.' The interview did its job. The student got his job in journalism and is now the celebrated historian and member of the House of Lords Peter Hennessy. For 30 years beginning in 1972, Lehrer's working life was teaching two courses at Santa Cruz. One was a mathematics course for students whose main subject was something else – he called it 'Maths for Tenors'. The other was a course on The American Musical. It was work he loved, and his students loved him. But he was a private man, he disliked fame, and he did his best to live as though it had not happened to him. He was indifferent to money – he had enough for his needs, and no interest in acquiring more – so he put a legal instrument on his website allowing anyone to do anything they liked with his work, without paying him royalties. This is in amazing contrast with most high-profile performers, who have international legal teams to guard their intellectual property. In 2008 he was visited in Santa Cruz by Norwegian journalist Erik Meyn, who had set up a Tom Lehrer channel on YouTube without asking permission, and felt guilty about it. Lehrer explained that he didn't mind, and even insisted on paying for their lunch: 'It's the least I can do, and that's why I'm doing it.' Lehrer's copyright decision gave rise to two shows which make their cheerful way round London's theatres and occasionally further afield. One is Stefan Bednarczyk's one-man show The Elements of Tom Lehrer. The other is my play, Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn't Want to Talk to You, with Shahaf Ifhar as Lehrer, which includes many of his greatest songs but also tries to get to the truth about this extraordinary and enigmatic man. I think it succeeds as far as anyone has ever succeeded, which is not very far.
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
Tom Lehrer obituary
No one ever fought off the trappings of fame and success so fiercely as the singer, songwriter, and mathematician Tom Lehrer, who has died aged 97. He was an enigma. The songs that made him famous were mostly written and recorded before 1960, after which he returned to teaching mathematics and tried to behave as though no one had heard of him. His songs were by turns gloriously vulgar, ludicrously macabre or ferociously political: I Got It from Agnes – 'it' being a sexually transmitted disease; I Hold Your Hand in Mine, in which the held hand is no longer attached to a body; and We Will All Go Together When We Go, perhaps the best anti-nuclear weapons song ever written, praising 'Universal bereavement / An inspiring achievement'. Others were wonderfully clever games with words and music, including The Elements (1959), which names all the chemical elements, set to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General. He began writing songs as a graduate student at Harvard, where he had enrolled at 15 and had taken a first-class maths degree at 18. He sang them to his friends and soon people started asking him to perform at parties. 'My songs spread slowly,' he said. 'Like herpes, rather than Ebola.' The politics and rudeness of his material put off the record companies, so in 1953 he paid for 400 discs to be cut of a record called Songs of Tom Lehrer, having worked out that if he sold them all, he would break even. He sold many more than that: he had to keep getting them cut. His university idyll was broken by a period with the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos, and two years in the army. 'I dodged the draft for as long as anybody was shooting at anybody,' he said. 'I waited until everything was calm and then surrendered to the draft board.' Afterwards he wrote the song It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier, about strange and disturbing army folk: 'Now Fred's an intellectual, brings a book to every meal. / He likes the deep philosophers, like Norman Vincent Peale.' Peale was a famous evangelical Christian of even more than usual banality and intolerance, and also the Trump family pastor, who gave the US president his ethical base. After the army, Lehrer returned to studying and singing in night clubs in New York and other cities, while his reputation grew in a samizdat sort of way – record companies ignored him and newspapers sneered, but his growing army of fans loved him. He undertook a series of concert tours, including in the UK, and produced another album, More of Tom Lehrer, in 1959, with a live concert version, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, also released. Then, in 1960, he stopped, and that was almost that, except that in 1964 he was lured back to write some songs for the American version of That Was the Week That Was. During the 1970s he contributed songs to the children's educational television programme The Electric Company and, two years later, appeared in episodes of the Frost Report at the BBC. There were occasional songs after that – (I'm Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica in 1990 is probably the best known ('Amid the California flora / I'll be lighting my menorah, /Like a baby in his cradle / I'll be playing with my dreidl'). In 1980, the British producer Cameron Mackintosh persuaded him to agree to a revue of his songs called Tomfoolery, which started life at the Criterion theatre in London. But Lehrer neither appeared in it nor wrote new material for it. He was done with performing. Born in New York, Tom was the elder son of James Lehrer, a prosperous necktie manufacturer, and his wife, Anna (nee Waller). He learned to play the piano, fell in love with the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter, and attended private schools, which discovered they had a mathematics prodigy on their hands. So he went to Harvard, and took a master's in 1947, the year after his degree, before settling down to the life of a graduate student, which he enjoyed. He registered for a doctorate but never finished it. Over the years he gave various reasons for stopping song-writing and performing. 'What's the point of having laurels if you can't rest on them?' he asked. He said he never supposed he might be doing some good, and quoted Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin kabaretts of the 30s, 'which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the second world war'. Things that were once funny now scared him. 'I'm not tempted to write a song about George W Bush,' he said of the then US president. 'I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.' He said that satire died when they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel peace prize, but that was not his reason for giving it up. However, if you listen to his students, you come away thinking the biggest factor was that he loved teaching and wanted to spend his life doing it. He taught on the US east coast until 1972, when he moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where for almost 30 years he taught two classes: The American Musical and The Nature of Math. The American fiction writer Greg Neri wrote: 'He was very humble, his fame meant nothing to him, the past he'd fob off as nothing more than messing around with satire. But get him talking about the American musical and he was off and running … He was truly delighted to see a play get on its feet and the day we performed it, he was all grins … He was extremely kind and patient with students.' Other former students reported that you did not mention his career as a performer, or ask about his personal life: it was an unspoken rule in his class. There is a video he recorded in 1997 called The Professor's Song. One of the songs, to another Gilbert and Sullivan tune, begins 'If you give me your attention I will tell you what I am. / I'm a brilliant mathematician, also something of a ham.' But these were private songs for his students. He had turned his back on fame and fortune. And the most dramatic illustration of that came in 2020 when he announced that his lyrics and sheet music were now available for anyone to use or perform without paying royalties. I benefited from this when writing a play called Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math and Doesn't Want to Talk to You, and including many of his greatest songs. It was performed last year at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate, north London, and is due to return this November at the OSO Arts Centre, south of the river in Barnes. 'Help yourselves, and don't send me any money,' he wrote on his website. So I did. Thomas Andrew Lehrer, singer, songwriter, satirist and mathematician, born 9 April 1928; died 26 July 2025
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
It's not all haggis and Scotch pies up here
I'm not sure who Zainab Johnson's been talking to, but she'll have no problem finding vegan/plant-based food here in Edinburgh during the fringe ('I spent a month sleeping in a cupboard': comedians on the true cost of the Fringe, 27 July). We have thousands of restaurants, the vast majority offering plant-based McGovernEdinburgh I too expect Nigel Farage to be on Gardeners' Question Time soon (Letters, 24 July). Not for any money-tree expertise, however, but because it seems to be the only BBC media platform to which he isn't already given regular open HineKingston upon Thames, London I agree that 'Having a well-informed tranche of young voters would be wonderful' (Letters, 23 July). But given many electoral results here and in the US, I would go further: having well-informed voters would be BarrettNettleton, Lincolnshire We will remember Tom Lehrer by poisoning some pigeons in the park (Tom Lehrer, acclaimed musical satirist of cold war era, dies aged 97, 28 July). Derek McMillan Durrington, West Sussex A review of The Winter's Tale (23 July), but no mention of the climactic bear scene! The best bit. Actually, all I remember of the BrookerWest Wickham, London Why are women performing on a stage called 'actor' instead of 'actress' but women performing on a football field 'Lionesses' instead of 'Lions'?Christine FuchsChigwell, Essex Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
