That Was the Musical Satire That Was

Most great comedians have musical talent. Comedy and music require many of the same skills: A sense of rhythm and timing, a mastery of the human voice as an instrument of expression. There is also a connection between comedy writing and lyric writing. A good lyric, like a good joke, must resolve, must "click" in the ear, to be satisfying. Good lyrics, whether or not they're intended to be funny, consist of the same repeating format of jokes: Setup, payoff; setup, payoff. A lyric that doesn't quite rhyme, or in which emphasis lands on the wrong syllables, hurts the ear and ruins the payoff, just like a badly-written joke with a flimsy premise.

Despite the fact that almost all great comedians are also musical, there have been very few great musical comedians -- that is, comics who belonged to the world of music as much as to the world of comedy. Danny Kaye was one. Also Victor Borge. Maybe Allan Sherman. And in contemporary times, "Weird Al" Yankovic has proven to be a lasting, funny, presence. And that's about it, except for Tom Lehrer.

Lehrer's career was brief and brilliant. His real profession was mathematics, and he stumbled into songwriting while an undergraduate at Harvard. One of his first songs was "Fight Fiercely, Harvard," a more genteel variation on the standard football fight song. (The following clip is audio only.)

Lehrer's earliest songs dealt mostly with math and science; his astonishing setting of the Periodic Table of Elements to Gilbert and Sullivan's "Modern Major General" remains a highlight of his career. His first album, Songs by Tom Lehrer, was a homemade, self-produced affair, sold by mail order; it spread from college to college in 1953 and earned him a cult following, despite the fact that no disc jockey would play his songs on the radio. Songs by Tom Lehrer consisted mainly of nimble parodies of popular song forms -- the Western ballad ("The Wild West is Where I Want to Be"), the homesick Southern anthem ("I Wanna Go Back to Dixie"), the interminable folk song ("The Irish Ballad"). It also included "Lobachevsky," an elaborate musical character piece in the Danny Kaye / Sylvia Fine tradition. His next batch of songs, in 1959, was released as both a studio record (More of Tom Lehrer, which sounds a little flat today) and a live concert recording (An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, which holds up extremely well). Lehrer's increasing mastery of satirical songwriting yielded gems like "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," and his proposed theme song for the movie version of Oedipus Rex (again, the clip is audio only):

Lehrer was always frank about the fact that although he loved songwriting, he hated show business. The rigors of touring disgusted him, and he complained about the tedium of performing the same songs over and over again. In the early Sixties, he stopped touring, and probably would have been happy to concentrate on teaching, writing only for his private amusement. But we never would have gotten to hear his best songs. They were written for the U.S. edition of the satirical British news program That Was the Week That Was, a forerunner to The Daily Show. Its writing staff included Peter Cook, Kenneth Tynan, Roald Dahl, and future Pythons John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Lehrer was the show's "resident songwriter," and although he never appeared on the show himself (his songs were performed by others), he eventually recorded them live at the hungry i in San Francisco. These recordings became his greatest achievement, the LP That Was the Year That Was. It's a measure of that record's impact that Lehrer is mostly remembered as a political satirist, even though his previous albums touched on social and political issues only slightly.

That Was the Year That Was is one of the founding documents of musical satire; it is the Sgt. Pepper of funny songs (it finally went gold in 1996). It includes what is now his best-known number, the hilarious "Vatican Rag," as well as his most pointed statements. In a ballad of ostensible tribute to Wernher von Braun, Lehrer sang:

Don't say that he's hypocritical.

Say rather that he's apolitical.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

"That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown,

but some think our attitude should be one of gratitude,

like the widows and cripples in old London town

who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.

"National Brotherhood Week," the album's opener, played on the gap between well-intentioned celebrations of diversity and the bigotry that runs just below the surface:

Introducing "So Long, Mom," Lehrer asserts that "every great war produces its great hit songs," and that "if any songs are going to come out of World War III, we'd better start writing them now."



Lehrer did quit show business after That Was the Year That Was. He does not seem to have missed it much. He is happier, to this day, with the life of a teacher; in California, he now teaches classes in both mathematics and musical theatre. He has emerged occasionally. In the Eighties, Cameron Mackintosh produced Tom Foolery, a revue featuring Lehrer's songs; around the same time, Lehrer contributed songs about grammar ("Silent E," "L-Y") to PBS's The Electric Company. He has mostly declined to comment on contemporary politics, observing in one interview that to do political satire in this age would be like a resident of Pompeii making humorous comments about lava. (He did tell the Washington Post last year that he was voting for Obama.)

In 1998, Lehrer appeared on stage for the first time in over twenty-five years, at a gala in honor of Cameron Mackintosh. He was given a beautiful introduction by Stephen Sondheim -- who was a childhood friend of Lehrer's, and whom Lehrer has frequently described as the greatest lyricist in the history of the English language. Lehrer performed "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" as though he'd never left: