In the 1950s and 60s, his songs stunned and delighted listeners with their irreverence, wit and nihilism. Then he gave it all up to teach mathematics. Lehrer is still alive at 96 – so I went in search of answers
In 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral.
There was the American football song Fight Fiercely, Harvard, which seemed to make cruel mock of those cold, dreary afternoons I was forced to spend watching my school play rugby.
This early samizdat recording was the underground success of the decade with almost no publicity effort from Lehrer – “My songs spread slowly, like herpes, rather than Ebola,” he later recalled.
In the next year or two, Ed Monaghan introduced me to other comedians who were turning the complacent world of American comedy on its head: Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce.
It’s simply a list of all the elements in the periodic table, sung to the tune of the Major General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance – “There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium / And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium” – and it’s virtually impossible for anyone without Lehrer’s gifts to sing it, although Daniel Radcliffe made a pretty good effort on a chatshow a few years ago.
In high excitement, I went to the artistic directors at Upstairs at the Gatehouse – the north London fringe theatre that has been a home for my last two plays – and suggested I write them a show about Lehrer, weaving as many of his greatest songs into the narrative as we could.
The original article contains 1,751 words, the summary contains 248 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral.
There was the American football song Fight Fiercely, Harvard, which seemed to make cruel mock of those cold, dreary afternoons I was forced to spend watching my school play rugby.
This early samizdat recording was the underground success of the decade with almost no publicity effort from Lehrer – “My songs spread slowly, like herpes, rather than Ebola,” he later recalled.
In the next year or two, Ed Monaghan introduced me to other comedians who were turning the complacent world of American comedy on its head: Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce.
It’s simply a list of all the elements in the periodic table, sung to the tune of the Major General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance – “There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium / And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium” – and it’s virtually impossible for anyone without Lehrer’s gifts to sing it, although Daniel Radcliffe made a pretty good effort on a chatshow a few years ago.
In high excitement, I went to the artistic directors at Upstairs at the Gatehouse – the north London fringe theatre that has been a home for my last two plays – and suggested I write them a show about Lehrer, weaving as many of his greatest songs into the narrative as we could.
The original article contains 1,751 words, the summary contains 248 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!