ADVERTISEMENT Tom Lehrer, the celebrated American song satirist who lampooned politics, racism and the Cold War, then largely abandoned his music career to return to teaching mathematics at Harvard and other universities, has died. He was 97.
Longtime friend David Herder said Lehrer died Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He did not specify a cause of death.
A Harvard prodigy (he earned a math degree from the institution at age 18), Lehrer soon turned his very sharp mind to current events – including the threat of nuclear annihilation and discrimination.
His darkly comic ballads included ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’, ‘The Old Dope Peddler’, and the controversial ‘The Vatican Rag’, in which Lehrer, an atheist, poked at the rites and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church.
Some of his most enduring songs also include: ‘The Elements’, a list of the chemical elements set to the tune of ‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’ from “The Pirates of Penzance”, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera; ‘The Masochism Tango’, which contains the lyrics: “I ache for the touch of your lips, dear / But much more for the touch of your whips, dear…“; and ‘We Will All Go Together When We Go’, which includes the lyrics: “Oh, we will all fry together when we fry / We’ll be French-fried potatoes by-and-by / There will be no more misery / When the world is our rotisserie / Yes, we all will fry together when we fry.“
He mocked the forms of music he didn’t like and attacked in such an erudite, even polite, manner that almost no one objected.
Except the BBC, which banned most of his 1953 collection Songs by Tom Lehrer from the airwaves.
“Tom Lehrer is the most brilliant song satirist ever recorded,” musicologist Barry Hansen once said. Hansen co-produced the 2000 boxed set of Lehrer’s songs, ‘The Remains of Tom Lehrer’, and had featured Lehrer’s music for decades on his syndicated “Dr. Demento” radio show.
Lehrer was born in 1928 in Manhattan, the son of a successful necktie designer, and was a classically trained pianist.
After skipping two grades in school, he entered Harvard at 15 and, after receiving his master’s degree, he spent several years unsuccessfully pursuing a doctorate.
“I spent many, many years satisfying all the requirements, as many years as possible, and I started on the thesis,” he once said. “But I just wanted to be a grad student, it’s a wonderful life. That’s what I wanted to be, and unfortunately, you can’t be a Ph.D. and a grad student at the same time.”
Lehrer remained on the math faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz well into his late 70s. In 2020, he even turned away from his own copyright, granting the public permission to use his lyrics in any format without any fee in return.
Lehrer never married and had no children.
RIP Tom Lehrer: 1928 – 2025
