Even if he wasn’t seeking it, celebrity found Tom Lehrer. After two years in the Army, Lehrer started to perform full-time and eventually gained an international following. “He was a cult hero in England,” Robinson says. “He came in on a plane, and all of the reporters were waiting for him.” Lehrer also released an album of new material, “More Songs By Tom Lehrer.” The album included the darkly comedic song “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” a bouncy satire of cheesy springtime tunes featuring some truly inspired rhymes: “My pulse will be quickenin’ / With each drop of strychnine / We feed to a pigeon / It just takes a smidgen!” Barret E. Hansen—better known as Dr. Demento, the prominent radio host largely responsible for introducing recent generations to Lehrer—named “Pigeons” the most-requested Lehrer song on his program over the years.
And then, at the peak of his popularity up to that point, Lehrer decided to quit, returning to his graduate studies and teaching at Harvard. According to Robinson, performing had lost the novelty that made comedy so appealing for Lehrer—as audiences became more and more familiar with his catalog, Lehrer began to lose the sense of personal fulfillment he gained from surprising and intriguing people with his humor. Furthermore, as an outsider to the world of entertainment, Lehrer never felt controlled by the contracts and companies that keep many artists on the stage and in the studio when they have nothing compelling left to offer. When Lehrer stopped having fun playing music, he was able to stop performing without repercussions or regrets, Robinson said.
Lehrer’s reappearance in musical comedy would be his own decision. After returning to Harvard, Lehrer continued to work on his dissertation while teaching math and statistics at MIT, Harvard Business School, and Wellesley—but by the time he became a sixteenth-year graduate student, he left Harvard without finishing his Ph.D.
No longer an official scholar, Lehrer would find himself free to enter a new phase of his life—one that brought him back to the performing arts. In 1964, the American version of the satirical television news show “That Was The Week That Was” began to air. Without a Ph.D. to pursue, Lehrer found himself following the show, which would ultimately inspire another collection of comedic songs. According to Robinson, Lehrer realized that he was funnier than the show’s writers and began sending in his music, which quickly found its way onto the air.
RELIABLE NARRATOR
To many comedians and lovers of comedy, the unique satirical style of the songs written for “That Was The Week That Was” is Lehrer’s greatest legacy. The songs deal with the hot-button news stories of the time, ranging from Wernher Von Braun (“A man whose allegiance / Is ruled by expedience”) to pollution (“Just go out for a breath of air / And you’ll be ready for Medicare”) to censorship of “smut” (“Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately? / I’ve got a hobby: rereading ‘Lady Chatterley’”).
“Tom’s songs have a way of cutting straight to the essential absurdity of the subject, and revealing it directly, without over-explanation,” says Roy Zimmerman, a modern musical satirist whom Lehrer praised in the ’90s.
Hansen agrees with this characterization of Lehrer’s music. “He doesn’t hit you over the head with a baseball bat; he cuts with a scalpel. A lot of people do [satire] different ways,” Hansen says. “For Tom, it’s a way of assuming the narrator’s voice in a very believable way…he makes you believe that the voice of the narrator you hear in the song is true.” This, then might be the defining characteristic of Lehrer’s music. “Nobody since Tom has really been able to do what he’s done. There are no real successors to him.”
Even as a liberal, Lehrer deliberately avoided using his satire to push a political agenda, another choice that distinguishes him from modern-day satirists from Zimmerman to Stephen Colbert. Lehrer’s true agenda was to point out what he believed was hypocrisy and poor rhetoric regardless of the source—he suggests that the United States over-relies on the military in “Send The Marines,” but also pokes fun at what he calls a predominantly liberal crusade of political correctness in “National Brotherhood Week.” Hansen attributes this willingness to attack all ends of the spectrum partly to the fact that Lehrer worked in a time of significantly less political polarization than today: “Now, it’s almost impossible for somebody to carry on a career as a satirist and even attempt to provide a neutral point of view, which I think Tom was always trying to do.”
However, Hansen doesn’t see lack of neutrality as a reason to stop producing satire altogether. “Preaching to the choir is an often-heard word for what satirists do, but I think it’s valuable—reinforcing people’s commitment to the way they feel, and perhaps giving them a little more ammunition when they’re trying to convince other people.” Nevertheless, Lehrer’s type of satire allowed him to “preach” to both sides of the church, a capability rarely seen today.
DOUBLE IRONY
Lehrer stopped producing new political satire after the American version of “That Was The Week That Was” was canceled following its first season. The lack of any real successors to Lehrer’s style since his exit may, in fact, have as much to do with a fundamental shift in source material as gap in ability. Lehrer is fond of quipping that political satire became obsolete after the Nobel Peace Prize went to Henry Kissinger—in short, a suggestion that it’s impossible to apply Lehrer’s subtle brand of satire to events that themselves are already ironic. “Today, the line between satire and the original event is often invisible,” says Mark Russell, a musical satirist best known for his political specials on PBS.
Even when that line was more defined, though, Lehrer never bought into the idea that his songs could affect people’s politics. “As opposed to Pete Seeger, who believed that his songs could change views, Tom never really believed that his songs could change views,” Robinson, Lehrer’s friend and former classmate, says. “He believed that the people who liked your songs were the people who agreed with them. He just put together songs that he thought were funny.” It was that simple humor Lehrer found in crafting his songs that he truly hoped to share with his audience. His work sought common ground and a common sense of fun with his audience rather than mocked or discredited them. That process may have been easier since Lehrer never felt defined by his work as a musical comedian, choosing instead to remain an outsider and allowing himself to adopt a wide variety of narrative voices. Perhaps that was part of his broad appeal half a century ago, and what keeps him just as entertaining, intriguing, and provocative today.
—Staff writer Will Holub-Moorman can be reached at holubmoorman@college.harvard.edu.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
CORRECTION: Feb. 11
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the radio host better known as Dr. Demento. In fact, his real name is Barret E. Hansen, not Eugene B. Hansen.