Tom Lehrer chopping a cake backstage on the Palace Theatre in London in 1959.
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Night Customary/Getty Photos
Tom Lehrer chopping a cake backstage on the Palace Theatre in London in 1959.
Night Customary/Getty Photos
Tom Lehrer, a well-liked musical satirist who rose to fame within the Fifties and ’60s earlier than returning to a profession instructing math, has died at age 97.
Lehrer died on Saturday at his residence in Cambridge, Mass., his pal David Herder confirmed to NPR.
He was remembered throughout the leisure trade on Sunday, together with by “Bizarre Al” Yankovic, who referred to as Lehrer a “dwelling musical hero” in a social media publish on Sunday.
When Lehrer wasn’t instructing college-level math, he was sitting at a piano making folks chortle — and fear — concerning the world. His targets included politics, nuclear destruction, and even social concord.
“I might by no means sit down and say, ‘Immediately, I’ll write a humorous tune,'” he advised NPR in 1997.
Born in 1928, he was raised in New York Metropolis’s Higher East Aspect, in accordance with a 1981 Harvard Crimson profile, the place he took piano classes as a baby. He attended Horace Mann Excessive Faculty earlier than going to Harvard, the place he wrote “Struggle Fiercely Harvard,” his first recorded tune, which he wrote at 17 years previous.
His data unfold nicely past campus to turn out to be an underground sensation within the Fifties. Within the mid-Sixties, NBC aired a satirical present referred to as That Was The Week That Was. Producers turned to Lehrer for materials. Though solid members sang his songs, Lehrer later carried out and recorded them for intentional distribution.
“He established this style of comedy songwriting,” stated Rachel Bloom, a musical satirist and star of the CW TV present Loopy Ex-Girlfriend. Though she’s a number of generations youthful, Bloom says she realized so much from Lehrer’s work. “Once you’re doing comedy songs, you wish to take established genres and flip them on their head,” she stated. “It is virtually such as you wish to go reverse.”
When Tom Lehrer wished to ridicule and assault one thing, he did it from the within. He would falsely embrace what he detested.
Take his tune “The Vatican Rag.” It was for Lehrer a logical extension of the ecumenical council in Rome within the Sixties generally known as Vatican Two. Lehrer’s tune advised that one of the simplest ways for the Vatican to promote a product on this secular age could be to redo a number of the liturgical music in well-liked tune types.
Lehrer could have been a Jewish child from Manhattan, however he knew his catechism. Like all his work, “The Vatican Rag” was subversive and humorous. And Lehrer might be forward of his time. Even earlier than the general public had absolutely engaged on environmental harm, he wrote this: “Air pollution, air pollution, they acquired smog and sewage and dust. Flip in your faucet and get cold and warm operating crud.”
He retired from public performances within the Seventies and targeted on instructing. He taught for a few years on the College of California, Santa Cruz, splitting his time between there and Cambridge.
“I used to chortle extra. Now I get indignant,” he advised NPR in 1997. “And it is very exhausting to be satiric and — or to be humorous, to illustrate — and indignant on the similar time.”
NPR’s Chandelis Duster and James Doubek contributed to this report.
