Tom Lehrer was an American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, and mathematician, who later taught mathematics and musical theatre. He recorded pithy and humorous, often political songs that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. His songs often parodied popular musical forms, though they usually had original melodies. Lehrer was considered a child prodigy and skipped two grades. After graduation from Loomis School, at the age of 15 he entered Harvard College, where one of his professors was Irving Kaplansky. As an undergraduate student at Harvard, he began to write comic songs, to entertain his friends, including “Fight Fiercely, Harvard”. They were performed as The Physical Revue for Harvard’s physics department in 1951 and 1952. The revue was punningly revived by Lehrer in 1993 as Songs of the Physical Revue – a special performance for the American Physical Society to commemorate the centenary of their journal, the Physical Review.
Lehrer was mainly influenced by musical theatre. According to Gerald Nachman’s book Seriously Funny, the Broadway musical Let’s Face It! made an early and lasting impression on him. Lehrer’s style consists of parodying various forms of popular song. For example, his appreciation of list songs led him to write “The Elements”, which lists the chemical elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song”.”He gave his first public concert as a third-year graduate student, at the Sanders Theatre in 1950.” – Jeremy Bernstein.
In author and Boston University professor Isaac Asimov’s second autobiographical volume, In Joy Still Felt, Asimov recounted seeing Lehrer perform in a Boston nightclub on October 9, 1954. Lehrer sang a song about Jim getting it from Louise, and Sally from Jim, “…and after a while you gathered the ‘it’ was venereal disease. Suddenly, as the combinations grew more grotesque, you realised he was satirising every known perversion without using a single naughty phrase. It was clearly unsingable outside a nightclub.” (The song was likely “I Got It From Agnes”.) Asimov also recalled a song that dealt with the Boston subway system, making use of the stations leading into town from Harvard, observing that the local subject-matter rendered the song useless for general distribution. Lehrer subsequently granted Asimov permission to print the lyrics to “The Subway Song” in his book. “I haven’t gone to nightclubs often,” said Asimov, “but of all the times I have gone, it was on this occasion that I had by far the best time.”
Lehrer’s early performances dealt with non-topical subjects and black humour (also known as dark comedy) in songs such as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”. In the 1960s, he produced songs about timely social and political issues, particularly for the U.S. version of the television show That Was the Week That Was. The popularity of these songs has far outlasted their topical subjects and references. Lehrer quoted a friend’s explanation: “Always predict the worst and you’ll be hailed as a prophet.” In the early 1970s, Lehrer largely retired from public performance to devote his time to teaching mathematics and musical theatre history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Lehrer was encouraged by the success of his performances, so he paid $15 (equivalent to $176 in 2024) to record in a single one-hour session on January 22, 1953, at the TransRadio studio on Boylston Street in Boston, Songs by Tom Lehrer. The initial pressing was 400 copies. The album included the macabre “I Hold Your Hand in Mine”, the mildly risqué “Be Prepared”, and “Lobachevsky” regarding plagiarising mathematicians. It became a cult success by word of mouth, despite being self-published and without promotion. The limited distribution of the album led to a knock off album by Jack “Enjal” (a pseudonym of Jack Nagel) being released in 1958 without Lehrer’s approval, where some of the lyrics were mis-transcribed.
Lehrer had a breakthrough in the United Kingdom on December 4, 1957, when the University of London awarded a doctor of music degree honoris causa to Princess Margaret, and the public orator, Professor J. R. Sutherland, said it was “in the full knowledge that the Princess is a connoisseur of music and a performer of skill and distinction, her taste being catholic, ranging from Mozart to the calypso and from opera to the songs of Miss Beatrice Lillie and Tom Lehrer.” This prompted significant interest in Lehrer’s works and helped to secure distribution in Britain for his five-year-old debut album. It was there that his music achieved real sales popularity, as a result of the proliferation of university newspapers referring to the material, and inadvertently due to the BBC, which in 1958 banned from broadcast 10 of the 12 songs on the album. By the end of the 1950s, Lehrer had sold 370,000 records.
