Song of the Day 7/28: Tom Lehrer, “The Vatican Rag”

Tom Lehrer, the math professor whose satiric songs about nuclear war, sexual deviancy and other human follies made him a popular cult figure in the 1950s and ’60s, died Saturday at age 97. His clever wordplay and black humor bridged the gap between Cole Porter and Bo Burnham, and influenced the work of countless success like Randy Newman, Weird Al Yankovic and Steely Dan.

Lehrer retired from performing after the ’60s, but it wasn’t because, as he once quipped, “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Back in 1994 he told Wilmington’s George Stewart of Crazy College fame, “I guess I don’t think that things are so funny anymore. I think more in terms of assassination than satire.”

Lehrer was a math prodigy, graduating at 18 from Harvard, where he regaled friends at parties with numbers like “I Got It From Agnes” and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” which fit in with the so-called “sick humor” trend of the ’50s. Word got around, leading to club appearances, but Lehrer saw no commercial potential in his pointed parodies and didn’t think record companies would either. So he shelled out his own money to press 400 copies of an LP he recorded in a one-hour session. Initially sold at his shows and later by mail order, publicized almost entirely by word of mouth, its sales eventually topped 300,000.

Lehrer’s material drew plenty of critical scorn that he gleefully reproduced on his album covers. The opprobrium didn’t hurt sales; they took off in Britain after the BBC banned 10 of the 12 tunes on his first LP. He moved into more political territory as the Cold War deepened, penning such tunes as “We Will All Go Together When We Go” and his World War III fight song, “So Long, Mom” (“So long, Mom, I’m off to drop the bomb, so don’t wait up for me”), culminating in a series of topical tunes written for the American version of the TV infotainment show “That Was the Week That Was.”

Though he loved musical theater – he once said Stephen Sondheim, an acquaintance from school days, “is the greatest lyricist the English language has produced and that’s not an opinion, that’s a fact” – his day job as a university math professor better fit his temperament. “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection. If they buy my records, I love that,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”

He recorded his last LP, 1965’s “That Was the Year That Was,” at a series of performances at the hungry i in San Francisco, gigs he accepted just so he could record the songs. The album spent 51 weeks on the Billboard chart, peaking at No. 18. Most of the song were written for the show, but a few were too controversial for TV, including his take on the Catholic Church’s attempts at modernization. The crowd that night roared, but not everyone was pleased.

As a treat for the Sondheim lovers in the crowd, here’s one of Lehrer’s last public appearances, at a tribute honoring Cameron Mackintosh, the British theater producer who put together “Tomfoolery,” a revue of Lehrer’s work, in the 1980s.

Lehrer never married and had no children. In 2020 he renounced all rights to his work and put it in the public domain, and though he knew it remained popular, he was under no illusions about its lasting value.

“I don’t think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly,” he told the AV Club in 2000. “It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted … I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin Kabaretts of the 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.”