By the 70's he had gone back to teaching mathematics---urban legend had it that he stopped writing political satire when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I guess he figured that was satire enough. However, in the 80's musical review of his songs, Tomfoolery, was a hit on the London stage.
In 2000, a boxed set of his work was released by Rhino Records. It includes work from several albums, including the best-known, TWTWTW. You'd think a song from 40 years ago would be dated...I dunno, does this really sound so passe?
Members of the corps
All hate the thought of war;
They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means.
Stop calling it aggression,
Ooh, we hate that expression!
We only want the world to know
That we support the status quo.
They love us everywhere we go,
So when in doubt,
Send the Marines!
"Send in the Marines" Tom Lehrer
OR
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve,
'Cause they're on our side (I believe).
China got the bomb, but have no fears;
They can't wipe us out for at least five years!
Who's next?
Then Indonesia claimed that they
Were gonna get one any day.
South Africa wants two, that's right:
One for the black and one for the white!
Who's next?
"Who's Next" Tom Lehrer
The following is an interview Tom Lehrer gave to the Sidney Morning Herald. I've cut and pasted it here since the Aussie newspaper makes a visitor register and answer way too many questions to read the content on their site.
Stop clapping, this is serious
March 1 2003
Tom Lehrer is still feisty and funny, but the king of sophisticated satire tells Tony Davis there's no place for his style of humour now: the world just wouldn't get it.
'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 satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them."
The speaker is Tom Lehrer, arguably the most famous living satirical songwriter. And, in a roundabout way, the New York-born singer, composer and mathematician is explaining why he has been all but silent since 1965.
It's 50 years since Lehrer's first recordings, and 38 years since his last album of new material, yet word that we've secured an interview has people around the office launching into such unlikely yet infectious ditties as The Vatican Rag, Smut and Lehrer's ode to spring pursuits, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.
It also has people asking with a surprised tone: "Is he still alive?" Yes, Lehrer is very much with us, despite being quiet for so long (he once told The New York Times he had encouraged rumours of his demise in the hope of cutting down junk mail). And the writer of the nuclear holocaust anthem We Will All Go Together When We Go, and the prescient Pollution, is as feisty and as funny as ever. He just isn't doing anything about it.
Lehrer is that rarest of beasts a performer who was never seduced by the roar of the crowd and who rejected show business well before it had a chance to do the same to him. His concert tours were brief and motivated either by a desire to visit a new place (such as Australia, in 1960) or to test and polish material for a recording. Even after his biggest hit, the 1965 album That Was the Year that Was, he quickly returned to academic life rather than cash in with concert tours.
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"I wasn't really a performer by temperament," he explains today. "I can't imagine Rex Harrison doing the same My Fair Lady every night for years. That would drive me crazy.
"I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record."
"The record" is a body of work comprising fewer than 50 songs, yet one that has made an indelible impression, not just with the many musicians and humorists who cite him as a hero.
In 1999, Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Winston Churchill and famous chronicler of the 20th century, named Lehrer as one of the 10 great figures of the previous 100 years. "Lehrer was able to express and to expose, in humorous verse and lilting music, some of the most powerful dangers of the second half of the century ... Many of the causes of which Lehrer sang became, three decades later, part of the main creative impulse of mankind," he said.
Boredom wasn't the only reason Lehrer gave up the industry that made him famous and, thanks to a very canny business sense, surprisingly wealthy (his first album was recorded for just $15 and sold more than 370,000 copies on his own label). Years ago, Lehrer quipped: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." And he wasn't being entirely flippant. Almost everything about the world of entertainment and politics has changed and he doesn't see any room for a modern-day Tom Lehrer.
"With audiences nowadays I see it with these late-night [TV show] people, Jay Leno, David Letterman and so on the audience applauds the jokes rather than laughs at them, which is very discouraging.
"Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh. But you can easily clap just to say [deadpan]: 'A ha, that's funny, I think that's funny.' Sometimes they cut to the audience and you can see they are applauding madly. But they're not laughing."
Then there are the issues themselves. When Lehrer talks in his still-boyish voice about vaporising Bush, he quickly adds: "And that's not funny." It's hard not to laugh, nonetheless, if only because of the sudden change of tone accompanying the word vaporise.
"OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire," he says.
The issues during the Cold War days of mutually assured destruction were, Lehrer insists, easier to make fun of. "Things are much more complicated. Feminism versus pornography, for example. There are a lot of feminists who think it is bad, but others think it's good.
"I have become, you might call it mature I would call it senile and I can see both sides. But you can't write a satirical song with 'but on the other hand' in it, or 'however'. It's got to be one-sided.
"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 landmines."
Telling sophisticated jokes about politics is something Lehrer believes works only in clubs such as the hungry i in San Francisco. Those clubs don't exist any more, nor, he reasons, do the audiences that once filled them.
"The people who go to comedy shows are kids that don't know anything, I think, and so you have to make jokes about your girlfriend or your family or that kind of thing only, make them as vulgar as possible."
Television has taken over the mainstream comedy beat, he says, and generally won't stand for partisan political humour because it will offend half the potential audience. "One of the problems I see with these comics on television, particularly cable television, is, since you can say anything in terms of sex and scatological references and so on, therefore, you should do it. So they all limit themselves to these subjects and this vocabulary. My objection is that it is a lack of articulateness."
He adds that it's not funny just to say something insulting about the president. "Irreverence is easy, but what is hard is wit. Wit is what these comedians lack." Lehrer admires Eddie Izzard and a small number of other modern comics, but has no solutions to what he sees as a decline in political satire.
He says he couldn't do anything with the Israelis and the Palestinians "because I'm against everybody and I can't take a side". Nor can the man who found so many snappy couplets and delightful tunes in impending nuclear doom see any toe-tapping inspiration in September 11, the invasion of Iraq, or the thing he seems most keen to talk about the Columbia space shuttle explosion.
"They are calling it a disaster instead of a screw-up, which is all it was. They're calling these people heroes. The Columbia isn't a disaster. The disaster is that they're continuing this stupid program.
"One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record That Was the Year that Was in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon.
"I was against the manned space program then and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money. And so, when seven people blow up or become confetti, then they've asked for it. They're volunteers, for one thing."
Not the sort of sentiments that will get you air time in the US at the moment, he agrees. And clearly signs of a man who is getting highly passionate, yet who acknowledges such a condition is bad for humour. "That's what happened to [satirist] Lenny Bruce. He got angry, and then he wasn't funny any more. You have your choice there."
It would be wrong to assume, however, that Lehrer, 74, is bitter and twisted. He proves quick-witted, lively and extremely friendly. He keeps a keen watch on the world from his Santa Cruz beach house and, although he stopped teaching two years ago, he still "hangs out" around the University of California at Santa Cruz.
He writes songs for friends and special occasions "nothing recordable," he insists and, for his own pleasure, plays selections from the heyday of the American musical theatre on his piano. That's no surprise Lehrer's sense of rhyme and rhythm is as acute as the best Broadway songwriters and, for 25 years, he taught a course on the American musical, alongside mathematics.
He says Stephen Sondheim "is the greatest lyricist the English language has produced and that's not an opinion, that's a fact". He also reveals a soft spot for The Simpsons, which he calls the most consistently funny show on television.
Talk of the manned space program turns to questions on Lehrer's hilariously black song about Nazi rocket scientist-turned-NASA star recruit Wernher von Braun.
He says that a line from the 1965 song "once the rockets are up/ who cares where they come down/ that's not my department, says Wernher von Braun" is his most quoted.
"The idea that Wernher von Braun was a hero didn't make me angry so much as, well, it was just so silly. It was one thing to hire him, OK, but to make him a hero, which a lot of people did ... he may have helped us land on the moon a few years earlier than we did, but who cares?"
The widespread rumour that von Braun sued Lehrer proves to be a furphy. "I've heard that a lot, that I have to pay all my royalties for the song to him and so on and so forth. No, that's one of those myths. There is no possible way he could have sued me."
Lehrer's decision to give a rare interview was at least partly motivated by his desire to talk about his Australian tour of early 1960, during which he was banned, censored, mentioned in several houses of parliament and threatened with arrest. He calls it "the highlight of my life".
When he arrived in Australia, he hadn't sold a huge number of records, but press had been given to Princess Margaret's affection for the recordings of this "sick singer" and "professional ghoul". In an era when most American performers rushed in and out quickly, Lehrer stayed for two months, and his highly quotable quips made him a press and television favourite.
"The Sydney and Melbourne concerts were fine I think the best audience I've ever had was in Melbourne. But Brisbane was a problem because the chief of police said I couldn't sing the boy scout song, particularly. That was the one that bothered them."
That song was Be Prepared!, including such revised scout pledges as: "Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice/ Unless you get a good percentage of her price."
He says: "The chief of police couldn't come out with any specific threat and so I took a chance and I sang the song and everything was fine. The Sydney and Melbourne papers were having a wonderful time reporting this but, in Adelaide, they caught on and they didn't want to be made fools of, so they made me sign a petition saying that I wouldn't sing five songs. And, since I was using the Town Hall and it was sold out already, there wasn't much I could do."
The ban also covered I Hold Your Hand in Mine, the tale of a man who cut off his girlfriend's hand and kept it as a "precious souvenir". "The Australian Opera had just done Salome in Adelaide," remembers Lehrer, "where she cuts off the guy's head and carries it around, but they objected to my song."
Unfortunately for authorities, they couldn't ban what they didn't know about, so Lehrer was able to sing several songs then unreleased in Australia, such as The Masochism Tango (Sample lyric: "Take your cigarette from its holder/ And burn your initials in my shoulder/ Fracture my spine/ And swear that you're mine/ As we dance to the Masochism Tango.")
By the time he left, it was fair to say Lehrer was more famous in Australia than anywhere else.
His second album, launched here soon after the tour, carried more song parodies than political comment pieces. It wasn't until That Was the Year that Was in 1965 that Lehrer's songs became overtly political. In the scathing National Brotherhood Week, he sang: "Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics/ And the Catholics hate the Protestants/ And the Hindus hate the Muslims/ And everybody hates the Jews." (Lehrer has a Jewish background, but is not religious.)
He caused even more outrage (and plenty of mirth) with The Vatican Rag, a swipe at the Catholic Church's attempt to modernise, which set a proposed "hymn" to a brash show tune ("Get in line in that processional/ Step into that small confessional/ There, the guy who's got religion'll/ Tell you if your sin's original/ If it is, try playin' it safer/ Drink the wine and chew the wafer/ Two, four, six, eight/ Time to transubstantiate").
And he gave US foreign policy one serve after another in songs such as Send the Marines.
Sadly, though, Lehrer is of the opinion that while satire may attract attention to an issue, it doesn't achieve a lot else.
"The audience usually has to be with you, I'm afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was titillating the converted.
"The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be."
His favourite quote on the subject is from British comedian Peter Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in 1961, said it was to be a satirical venue modelled on "those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War".
Lehrer says you can't satirise real evil. "You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes ... but you can't make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good."
Lehrer enjoyed quoting scathing reviews on his album covers ("More desperate than amusing," said the New York Herald Tribune; "He seldom has any point to make except obvious ones," reported the Christian Science Monitor) and referring to himself as the derriere-garde in American music. Those few interviews he has granted in recent years are also filled with self-deprecation.
"Well, that's part of the act," he says with a laugh. "I can't say 'I'm the greatest performer that there ever was'. But, if I say 'you probably won't like these songs', it works."
It's his way of saying he's proud of what he's done. "There are some words here and there I would probably change but, for the most part, I'm delighted that I don't have to be ashamed of it."
Memorable stage patter
On ageing: "It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years."
On performing: "It isn't as though I have to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, $3000 a year just teaching."
On his claimed Latin translation of The Wizard of Oz: "[it] remains even today the standard Latin version of that work..
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