At the age of 97, mathematician Tom Lehrer, who rose to prominence as a musical satire in the 1950s and 1960s, has away. According to Variety, friends found him dead at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday.
When Lehrer’s darkly humorous songs appeared on NBC’s That Was the Week That Was, a comedy news program based on a British program hosted by David Frost, he became well-known across the country.
The humorist juggled two jobs as a humorous singer and a math professor. Variety claims that his observations on American culture had an impact on succeeding satirists such as Randy Newman and Weird Al Yankovic.
After seeing Daniel Radcliffe perform Lehrer’s “The Elements Song” on the Graham Norton Show, Yankovic told NMEin 2022 that he decided to cast Radcliffe as the character in his biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
Lehrer, a mathematical genius who was born into a Jewish household in New York, enrolled at Harvard at the age of 15 and graduated with honors in 1946. He started taking piano lessons when he was seven years old and became a skilled keyboardist who could perform almost any style.
Songs of Tom Lehrer, his self-released debut album from 1953, was recorded for forty dollars in a single Boston studio session. Selling 10,000 copies, it became an underground hit after first appearing on college campuses in Boston.
Lehrer’s breakthrough album, That Was the Year That Was, released by Reprise Records in 1965, peaked at number 18 on the US charts. The CD included songs that addressed contentious issues such as education (The New Math), the Catholic Church (The Vatican Rag), nuclear proliferation (So Long Mom), and discrimination (National Brotherhood Week).
During the optimistic Eisenhower era, he had already established himself in the musical black humor genre with his earlier work. Sexuality (The Masochism Tango), drug addiction (The Old Dope Peddler), Boy Scout homosexuality (Be Prepared), and militarism (It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier) were among the taboo topics that the songwriter tackled at the time.
Lehrer’s career as a public performer was relatively short, despite his fame and significance. The New York Times claims that Lehrer permanently ceased performing in 1967.
Lehrer spent the rest of his life teaching mathematics and musical theater at the University of California Santa Cruz after penning songs for the educational PBS series The Electric Company and performing at Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s 1972 fundraising events.
Numerous reissues of his work, such as the 1980 London revue Tomfoolery, the 2000 boxed set The Remains of Tom Lehrer from Rhino Records, and digital releases from Shout! Factory—which also released a DVD of a 1967 show in Oslo, Norway—continued his legacy.
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