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TOM LEHRER: SINGER, SONGWRITER AND SATIRIST  
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Francis Beckett
July 29, 2025
The Guardian
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_ Lehrer's songs, by turns gloriously vulgar, ludicrously macabre or
ferociously political, 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. _

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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
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sexually transmitted disease; I Hold Your Hand in Mine
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is no longer attached to a body; and We Will All Go Together When We
Go
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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
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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
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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
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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 and, two years later, appeared in episodes
of The Frost Report at the BBC. During the 1970s he contributed songs
to the children’s educational television programme The Electric
Company.

There were occasional songs after that – (I’m Spending) Hanukkah
in Santa Monica [[link removed]] 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”.

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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
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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
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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 [[link removed]] 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

_Francis Beckett is an author, journalist, broadcaster and
contemporary historian. He is the author of What Did the Baby Boomers
Ever Do for Us?
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Blair Inc, with David Hencke and Nick Kochan, His website can be
found here [[link removed]]._

_The Guardian [[link removed]] is globally renowned
for its coverage of politics, the environment, science, social
justice, sport and culture. Scroll less and understand more about the
subjects you care about with the Guardian's brilliant email
newsletters
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* Tom Lehrer
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* Music
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* satire
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