When Humor Was Clever

When we learned Sunday of the death of Tom Lehrer, my reaction was that I suspect was that of many: He was still alive?

(Nor was it the first time his passing had been reported, it turns out. In the erroneous death reports field he was the undisputed champion, blowing past Mark Twain and even Abe Vigoda. It the end, they all resolved the disputes by dying.)

Lehrer was, we were told, 97. Variety published an excellent and comprehensive obituary. What it didn’t and really couldn’t say was the effect Lehrer’s work had on a generation of people, myself included, or how his death illustrates the erosion of humor and celebrity in our country. The change has been much for the worse.

Subversive with a wink, Tom Lehrer was publicly known in the late 1950s and 1960s as an extremely perceptive composer and performer of ironic songs about the condition of our national and universal society. He was a (better) precursor of the likes of the late Mark Russell, though unlike Russell Lehrer had a day job: He was a brilliant mathematician and professor.

Upon hearing of Lehrer’s death, Charles Murray (no mean numbers cruncher himself and author of my favorite nonfiction book) commented, “The only distinction I can claim from my years at MIT is that I took introductory statistics from Tom Lehrer. The most fun I ever had at MIT was when Tom Lehrer played and sang at the Pol Sci Dept's Christmas party.” In retrospection, Lehrer reminds me a great deal of the great physicist Richard Feynman who, too, had a constant twinkle in his eye.

When the news came down Sunday, I hastened to send it to a couple of friends. One, whose avocation is politics and political humor and who is almost as old as I am, surprised me by responding, “Frankly, I never heard of him.”

It occurs to me that there are others similarly afflicted. Hence this column. I’m aided in the crusade by Lehrer himself, who in 2022 put his hilarious and insightful songs in the public domain. A tribute page at TomLehrer.com now begins thusly:

From the Harvard Crimson in 1981:\ RUMORS TO THE CONTRARY notwithstanding, Tom Lehrer is not now and never has been dead. Of course, he's heard the talk and seen published reports of his demise more than a few times. He even keeps a "Dead" file in his desk—with the London newspaper that praised a new revue of songs "written by the late Tom Lehrer," and the German clipping that announced his demise from "a loathesome disease." "I was hoping the rumors would cut down on the junk mail," Lerher said recently, "but they didn't."

His songs are here. They are preceded by his renunciation of rights to the songs, ending with, “In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.” You should go there and read the lyrics and listen to the songs. Some will be instantly clear, while others might require a little investigation — I wonder if there are people who do not know who Hubert Humphrey or the John Birch Society were — but if you undertake it you’ll be better for it.

(Humphrey was Lyndon Johnson’s Kamala Harris, resulting in President Richard Nixon. The John Birch Society, named for a Baptist missionary and U.S. Air Force captain who was killed by Chinese communists, was [is, I guess] an organization founded by Robert Welch. It ultimately became so cuckoo, in the fashion of modern “microaggressions,” that it and Welch were written out of the conservative movement by William F. Buckley Jr. I cannot find a Lehrer recording of the song, to which he wrote the lyrics, but it was a hit for the Chad Mitchell trio.)

Some of his comedy has held up. His take on Vatican II proved prescient — it needs revival, actually. Wouldn’t need to change a word.

There used to be a thing, started in the first third of the last century, called “National Brotherhood Week.” Its purpose was to promote harmony among religions. (As you may have noticed, it didn’t work.) Lehrer thought it worthy of musical consideration. He was right:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,\ And the Catholics hate the Protestants,\ And the Hindus hate the Moslems,\ And everybody hates the Jews.

How could he have predicted — remember, this was written 60 years or more ago — last week’s news stories?

Not all of us remember the Folk Scare of the 1950s and 60s, but it was real and required a response.

As a math professor during an era when small children were having their minds scrambled by the “new math” that would clear the way for their later drug abuse, he sought to explain it to his audience.

That done, he went after calculus.

Probably his most famous and enduring song, maybe because it stepped on no toes, was The Element Song, in which to the tune of Arthur Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” (from The Pirates of Penzance) he sang the names of all the elements. You still hear it from time to time. I heard it in an episode of NCIS years ago.

One could go on and on, and he did, and you should, by going to the page, where you can listen to the songs, and download them if you want, and read the lyrics.

Upon hearing of his death what struck me is how our comedy and entertainment have changed. At the time Lehrer was most famous, there was a weekly humor show on NBC called “That Was The Week That Was.” It introduced the U.S. to David Frost, and some others, including Buck Henry and Alan Alda. It was broadcast live. The opening song, sung by Nancy Ames (“our TW3 girl”) got new lyrics each week. Tom Lehrer was involved with the show, and released a live album, “That Was The Year That Was,” of songs drawn from it. It was all funny, clever, and witty — attributes that have largely disappeared from our humor.

For example, at the Nobel Prize dinner in 1962, President Kennedy said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” The current John Kennedy, a senator from Louisiana, does a kind of Foghorn Leghorn standup routine that summons the television cameras, especially those from channels that agree with his views. (Here’s one of his jokes: “Some folks in Washington have the IQ of a root vegetable.”) The current president, meanwhile, appeals mostly to the nasty, thuggish side of our natures. He is not clever, and should a witticism escape his lips it might be fatal.

In the last 10 days a great deal was made of the deaths of two people. One was famous for having allegedly bitten the head off a bat. The other capitalized on the effects of steroid abuse. Both deaths were front-page news.

The death of Tom Lehrer got some coverage, but nothing like that afforded the other two. Being clever, witty, and talented just doesn’t sell the way it used to.