At the age of 97, Tom Lehrer, a well-known musical satirist who gained popularity in the 1950s and 1960s before going back to teaching math, has away.
David Herder, Lehrer’s buddy, told NPR that Lehrer passed away on Saturday at his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home.
“Weird Al” Yankovic, who referred to Lehrer as a “living musical hero” in a social media post on Sunday, was among several in the entertainment business who paid recognition to him.
Lehrer was sitting at a piano, making people laugh and worry about the world when he wasn’t teaching college-level math. He targeted social harmony, politics, and even nuclear destruction.
“I could never sit down and say, ‘Today, I will write a funny song,'” he said before appearing on NPR in 1997.
According to a 1981 Harvard Crimson feature, he was born in 1928 and grew up in the Upper East Side of New York City, where he also took piano lessons. Before attending Harvard, he went to Horace Mann High School, where he composed his first recorded song, “Fight Fiercely Harvard,” at the age of 17.
In the 1950s, his records were an underground hit that went well beyond college. NBC ran a satirical program called That Was The Week That Was in the middle of the 1960s.Lehrer became a source of material for producers. Lehrer later performed and recorded his songs for purposeful distribution, even though cast members sung them.
According to Rachel Bloom, a musical satirist and star of the CW TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, “He established this genre of comedy songwriting.” Bloom said she gained a lot of knowledge from Lehrer’s work despite being several generations younger. “When you’re doing comedy songs, you want to take established genres and flip them on their head,” she explained. “It’s almost like you want to go opposite.”
Tom Lehrer attacked things from within when he felt the need to make fun of them. He would erroneously accept what he hated.
For example, “The Vatican Rag.” Lehrer saw it as a natural progression of the Vatican Two ecumenical council in Rome during the 1960s. Lehrer’s song implied that recreating parts of the liturgical music in popular song styles would be the Vatican’s greatest approach to market a product in this secular era.
Lehrer learned his catechism, even though he was a Jewish child from Manhattan. “The Vatican Rag” was humorous and subversive, as was all of his work. Furthermore, Lehrer might be ahead of his time. He wrote this even before environmental devastation had garnered widespread public attention: “Pollution, pollution, they got smog and sewage and mud.” Your tap will flow hot and cold when you turn it on.
In the 1970s, he stopped performing in public and concentrated on his teaching career. He shared his time between Cambridge and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he lectured for many years.
“I laughed more in the past. In 1997, he told NPR, “Now I get angry.” “And it’s very hard to be satiric and or to be funny, let’s say and angry at the same time.”
James Doubek and Chandelis Duster of NPR contributed to this story.
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