I wrote last week that my reflections on the death of Tom Lehrer would “have to wait for another time”. I feel as though I want to make this week that time, not because my mind is now cleared of all that was occupying it last week; it isn’t. Nor because things on the national and international front look much rosier this week; they don’t. If anything, things are even worse. However, there’s only so much doom and gloom I can wallow in, and I really feel as though I want to escape to somewhere more….innocent? Not the first word that springs to mind when considering Lehrer. Somewhere more civilised, certainly; more urbane; less intense. More ironic.

I’m not quite sure how to approach the subject of Tom Lehrer. I doubt if there are more than a handful of my readers who are not familiar with Tom Lehrer and his modest (in size), but wide-ranging (in subject-matter) oeuvre. If the name means little to you, then perhaps the best thing you can do is go to YouTube, search for him and spend an hour or four, letting him, in his own words: “… take you now on wings of song as it were and try and help you forget, perhaps, for a while, your drab, wretched lives.”

Which leads me neatly into two initial observations. First, four hours is all you will need, more or less, to listen to Lehrer’s entire musical oeuvre, even including all of the pirated videos from live appearances. A few of Lehrer’s songs were not initially issued on record – either because of issues of good taste (of which more later) or arcaneness. At a shockingly young age, Lehrer grew tired of performing, and stopped writing songs. As he later remarked: “Satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Secondly, once you start listening to Lehrer, you find that almost everything he wrote in his songs and his equally polished introductions to them is eminently quotable and, after a few repetitions, unforgettable. The comments below his obituary in The Times were full of people doing little more than sharing their favourite quotes from the songs.

Okay. Assuming the few of you who needed to do a pre-term make-up class in Lehreriana have done so, and are now back with us, I can now attempt to explain why I am convinced that his contribution to the comic song repertoire was unique and magnificent.

Let’s get the least memorable, but still essential, element of the Lehrer cocktail out of the way first. Tom, as I cannot imagine anyone referring to him (Tom is for ordinary folk like Hanks, not elite near-geniuses who skip a year of high-school for three consecutive years and win a place at Harvard at age 15, on the strength – if we believe the internet – of an application letter in the form of a poem) was born into a nominally American Jewish home, in which the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan were often on the gramophone. Here, one assumes, Lehrer developed his ear for a good tune and his recognition that in comic song the music has as key a role as the words.

Fortunately, Lehrer was also a sufficiently accomplished pianist to be able to execute what he had written, and to do so with such effortlessness that his whole attention appeared to be focussed on his verbal interaction with the audience. Which brings me to another point. Lehrer began his career performing his songs for fellow-students at parties, and he exudes the same relaxed and comfortable aura of being among friends even when he is performing for an audience in a large theatre (and even when the audience are not native English speakers and miss some of the cultural references). In one of his in-house performances at Harvard, he reprised a song by Noel Coward, and he shares with Coward an apparent social ease.

Enough, I think, of skipping round the edge of the lake, admiring the grassy verges and the ornamental bridge. The time has come to plunge in, and talk about the lyrics. The first point to be made is perhaps the breadth of the range of subject-matter. While Lehrer wrote for a season of That Was the Week that Was and dealt, there, with social, political and geopolitical satire, he felt free to range very much further afield. Indeed, since he had no sense of propriety (a word he rhymed with ‘impiety’ and ‘variety’ in one of his memorable triplets), the world was his oyster. Few writers of comic songs cover such topics as necromancy, drug peddling, sado-masochism and what we used to call venereal disease but is now apparently known as STD (which, when I was a boy, was a feature of the telephone system and stood for subscriber trunk dialling).

Consider these lines from I Got it from Agnes (the STD song):

Max got it from Edith
Who gets it every spring
She got it from her Daddy
Who just gives her everything

She then gave it to Daniel
Whose spaniel has it now

In many ways, this is an uncharacteristic lyric from Lehrer, in that it is not self-consciously clever. However, when he wants to, Lehrer can be cleverer than anybody else in the room. Consider this quick-fire rhyming pattern from a Gilbert and Sullivan parody recounting the story of the last verse of the story of Oh, my darling Clementine!

Though I missed her, I kissed her
Young sister named Esther
This mister to pester she tried.
Now her pestering sister’s a festering blister
You’d best to resist her, say I!

Two rhyme sounds there: one used in six different words (plus one repetition), and the other in four different words (plus one repetition), all in the space of thirty one words. If you think that sounds easy, please try it at home.

But of course he made it sound easy. He made it all sound easy. I knew that Daniel Radcliffe (possibly better known to you as Harry Potter) was a bear of little brain when he woked all over JK Rowling, the woman who gave him fame and fortune, on the occasion of her pointing out that ‘woman’ is a word with a biological meaning. However, you can also get a measure of Radcliffe’s maturity from the fact that, like many of us, he has learnt the lyrics of Tom Lehrer’s Elements song, but, unlike the rest of us, he considers it suitable for trundling out not only at parties but also on prime-time television. Having admired Lehrer’s faultless, unruffled and clearly enunciated performance (while playing the piano), contrast it with Radcliffe’s fumbling, mumbling, bumbling, gauche ineptitude here. One wonders what party pieces he rejected because they weren’t quite polished enough!

Of course, The Elements is an atypical Lehrer song, for several reasons. He composed neither the music nor the words. All of our delight is in the delightful and delighted execution, and the effortless way he has rearranged the elements into an order that may have no chemical elegance, but has a literary elegance.

It is also atypical in that it is not, to some degree of gentleness or sharpness, poking fun at attitudes, institutions or personalities. All were grist to Lehrer’s mill. To illustrate this, I am going to offer links in this section rather than quoting lyrics, because Lehrer’s relish in his skewering of targets is so tangible.

Fashionable social causes that liberals pay lip service to;

The ineffectualness of social protest songs

And countless others.

If the tunes were Lehrer’s piano, then the words were his forte.

The inevitability of the nuclear apocalypse might not seem an obvious topic for a comic song, but if you ensure the rhymes are tortuously brilliant, you can pull it off.

If you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner o’ l-
ater those you love will do the same for you
And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
tives to think of all the weeping they will do

As always, it is Lehrer’s aware but insouciant delivery that shows these pearls to best effect.

Pe4haps the best marriage of form and content in his body of work is in the setting of a song that purports to give an example of what the Catholic church should have been aiming for in its (then) desire to modernise the liturgy is Vatican Rag. The ragtime tune rings absolutely authentic, and Lehrer sets himself increasingly stiff rhyming hurdles, all of which he effortlessly sails over.

We come next to Lehrer’s other career, as a mathematics professor. Although he eventually abandoned his PhD studies, he was no slouch, and he wrote several amusing songs about mathematics. They were mostly written for consumption within the Harvard math department, but he eventually found one topic that non-mathematicians could relate to, since a whole nation of parents were being exposed to and befuddled by it in their children’s homework: new math. Now, obviously, you cannot write a comic song about new math that actually demonstrates and explains the underlying mathematical concepts of new math and is at the same time hilarious. Except that Lehrer did, of course. (I think I recommend listening to this without watching the annoying animation whose primary effect is to ruin the timing of Lehrer’s delivery.)

And now here we are exactly where I knew we would be: very nearly 1500 words in and there are at least another 15 songs that I absolutely have to talk about. You know what? Go back to YouTube and listen to the master himself: Poisoning Pigeons (with its rhymes for both ‘strychnine’ and ‘cyanide’, Alma (every word of which has historical authenticity), My Home Town, Wernher von Braun, Smut (the perfect mismatch of tune and lyric, and the best collection of rhymes on the first syllable of a word that breaks across a line). Anything, really. There are no duds here.

Lehrer’s greatest line? I’ll offer two contenders, one from an introduction to a song, the other from a lyric to a mock Harvard anthem.

Taken the second first, the line is just after here in Bright College Days.

And taking the first second, here’s 90 seconds of prologue that still break me up every time. followed by some people’s favourite song, which Lehrer liked to close his concerts with, for obvious reasons.

I’ll just leave you with Lehrer’s purported admission poem to Harvard, written, remember, at the age of 15. This sounds like an urban myth, but it appears that it was definitely written by Lehrer, even if he did not use it as his application letter, but simply an amuse-bouche for his fellow high-school students. Either way, it is the earliest record of his precocious and formidable talent. It is interesting to note, by the way, that long before Lehrer rhymed ‘Harvard’ with ‘discovered’, he rhymed it with ‘larva’ed’, which is less humorous but almost as impressive.

Dissertation on Education
Education is a splendid institution,
A most important social contribution,
Which has brought about my mental destitution
By its own peculiar type of persecution.
For I try to absorb
In the midst of an orb
Of frantic instructors’ injunctions
The name of the Fates
And the forty-eight states
And the trigonometrical functions,
The figures of speech
(With the uses of each)
And the chemical symbol for lead,
The depth of the ocean,
Molecular motion,
The names of the bones in the head,
The plot of Macbeth
And Romeo’s death
And the history of the Greek drama,
Construction of graphs
And the musical staffs
And the routes of Cortez and da Gama,
The name of the Pope,
The inventor of soap,
And the oldest American college–
The use of conceits,
The poems of Keats,
And other poetical knowledge.
I’m beginning to feel
I don’t care a great deal
For the reign of the Emperor Nero,
The poems of Burns,
What the President earns,
And the value of absolute zero,
The length of a meter,
The size of a liter,
The cause of inflation and failure,
The veins and the nerves,
Geometrical curves,
And the distance from here to Australia,
Reproduction of germs,
Biological terms,
And when a pronoun is disjunctive,
The making of cheese,
The cause of disease,
And the use of the present subjunctive.
I wish that there weren’t
Electrical current,
Such places as Rome and Cathay,
And such people as Watt
And Sir Walter Scott
And Edna St. Vincent Millay.
I don’t like very much
To learn customs and such
Of people like Tibetan lamas,
And I’d like to put curbs
On irregular verbs
And the various uses for commas,
International pacts
All historical facts,
Like the dates of Columbus and Croesus,
Bunker Hill, Saratoga,
And Ticonderoga,
The War of the Peloponnesus.
But although I detest
Learning poems and the rest
Of the things one must know to have “culture,”
While each of my teachers
Makes speeches like preachers
And preys on my faults like a vulture,
I will leave movie thrillers
And watch caterpillars
Get born and pupated and larva’ed,
And I’ll work like a slave
And always behave
And maybe I’ll get into Harvard…