Well, the zany genius Tom Lehrer is gone now, dead of old age at ninety-seven. Since he did not in fact perish in a nuclear holocaust, he was mistaken to suggest in 1959 that “We Will All Go Together When We Go”: fry together, bake together, burn together, for “When the air becomes uranious,/ We will all go simultaneous.” Still, I wonder whether in the months before his death he was singing to himself this or one of his other simultaneously dark and jaunty songs, like the World War III ballad from 1965 that begins, “So long, Mom,/ I’m off to drop the bomb,/ So don’t wait up for me.”
The tributes to America’s most distinguished songwriter-cum–mathematician have been rolling in. With no desire for the spotlight and a reputation based on a relatively small number of songs that have maintained a cult following for decades—as he famously put it, his renown spread like herpes rather than Ebola—Lehrer has long been compared to J. D. Salinger (“Weird Al” Yankovic called him “the J. D. Salinger of demented music”), though Thomas Pynchon might be more apt. (That said, Lehrer was not a recluse: his phone number was listed.) But what commentators are failing to point out is that Lehrer, though heavily associated with the Cold War, is, rather surprisingly, a man for our times.
Consider “National Brotherhood Week” (1965), which opens like this:
Oh, the white folks hate the black folks,
And the black folks hate the white folks.
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule.But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
Lena Horne and Sheriff Clarke are dancing cheek to cheek.
It’s fun to eulogize
The people you despise,
As long as you don’t let ’em in your school.
Sure, the reference to Horne and Clarke is dated, but Lehrer himself noted that the “line has been replaced many times by one with different appropriate pairings.” I rather like Thomas Sowell and Eddie Glaude. Or Robin D. and Clarence T.
There’s more, of course:
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.
Sound familiar?
Further evidence that one of the noisier members of the Silent Generation speaks (and sings) to us today comes from the travails of Lehrer’s alma mater, Harvard, and other institutions of higher education. As universities continue, under pressure, to fight fiercely—or not so fiercely—against anti-Semitism, they are also discovering that quite a number of their professors and senior administrators are plagiarists. Lehrer understood this unsavory academic practice, which he satirized, with a Russian accent, in “Lobachevsky” (ca. 1951):
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!Plagiarize!
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize—
Only be sure always to call it please “research.”
Still more evidence: among Lehrer’s many numbers about mathematics, one is not about topology or algebra or the mathematization of sociology but rather about a calculation “So very simple,/ That only a child can do it!” In “New Math” (1965), he skewered the then-popular way of teaching basic math that valued notions of “understanding” over getting the right answer—a method that Time magazine in 1999 listed as one of “the 100 worst ideas of the century,” along with New Coke. Here’s Lehrer:
And so you’ve got thirteen tens
And you take away seven,
And that leaves five . . .
Well, six actually . . .
But the idea is the important thing!
Now we’re in the next century, but new math is in some sense back in the controversial Common Core standards, as well as in an anti-racist movement known as “equitable math.”
Lehrer, who spent most of his life in the liberal enclaves of Cambridge and Santa Cruz, understood that difficult subjects often call for a sense of humor, an attitude thoroughly lost on dour progressives. As he once put it, “When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn’t say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can’t say ‘girl.’”
Some of Lehrer’s works are pure delight, like the chemical patter “The Elements” (1959), sung to the tune of “The Major General’s Song” from The Pirates of Penzance, which ends with a brilliant rhyme on “Harvard.” But the man often pushed the envelope, singing about masochism, necrophilia, and pornography. (A complete listing of his published song lyrics can be found here.) In 2000, a journalist for The New York Times interviewed him and wrote that “he confesses to still composing such questionable ditties as ‘Bye-bye, Baby’ (about ‘partial-birth’ abortion), though now strictly to appall himself.” That’s a song I want to hear in 2025. Perhaps it will turn up someday.
