Song of the Day 10/2: Tom Lehrer, “I Got It From Agnes”

For a hoax, this coronavirus sure gets around. This is how.

Satirist Tom Lehrer, a child prodigy who graduated from Harvard at age 18, tickled the intellectual crowd with his ditties throughout the 1950s and early ’60s before retiring from public performances so he could concentrate on his academic career; he taught both mathematics and musical theater at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Though he had stopped performing by then — he once counted that he performed only 109 live shows and wrote 37 songs over the course of 20 years — he also commented in 1973 that awarding Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize rendered political satire obsolete.

This song never appeared on any of his handful of LPs, but scientist and author Isaac Asimov heard it on a visit to a Boston nightclub in 1954. In his autobiography, he wrote that Lehrer sang cleverly about Jim getting it from Louise, and Sally from Jim, “…and after a while you gathered the ‘it’ was venereal disease [later versions substituted Agnes for Sally]. Suddenly, as the combinations grew more grotesque, you realized he was satirizing every known perversion without using a single naughty phrase. It was clearly unsingable (in those days) outside a nightclub.”

That was the case for many of Lehrer’s songs. When his first album was released in Great Britain in 1958, 10 of its 12 songs were banned by the BBC. Lehrer, still alive in California at 92, didn’t seem to mind. In the liner notes to a Rhino re-release of his first two albums in 1997, “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.”