From the earliest age, I
heard my parents play records by Tom
Lehrer, a mathematician who could
sing, play the piano, and write devastating verses about current events and
ideas. He stopped performing in public in the US after 1960, so few people
younger than baby boomers know about him.
He began by writing songs
that poked fun at vulnerable elements of culture, such as his first song,
composed when he was 17 and an undergraduate at Harvard, which satirized
college football fight songs. Those songs were fun to hear and sing along with:
“Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” about a program in Boston to control pigeons with
strychnine-infused corn kernels; “The
Elements” listing all 102 elements known as of 1959; and “Be Prepared”, a salacious version of the Boy Scout creed. Lehrer
earned his living as a university professor, and liked to make fun of
academics, as in what I think is his greatest song, “Lobachevsky”, about the
Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, who supposedly taught him
the secret of success – plagiarize.
In the early 1960s, Lehrer
stopped performing, but continued to write songs that were much more political.
His songs were performed by others on the satirical TV program “That Was The Week That Was” between 1963 and 1965. TW3 broke the broadcasting
conventions about political neutrality, and paved the way for later political
television, such as “Rowan
and Martin’s Laugh-In”, which
launched the careers of Goldie Hawn, Lily Tomlin, and other comics.
Lehrer poked fun at serious
subjects, such as racism, fascism, pollution and nuclear war. Listening to him
skewer racist hypocrites, imagine World War III, and exaggerate the effects of
poisons in our air and water certainly contributed to the development of my
political views. I wonder if he influenced the burst of anti-establishment
protest in the later 1960s among the small segment of record-purchasers and TV
viewers who heard his exuberant songs.
It’s comforting to think that
listening to some satirical political songs could reduce the polarization in
our current politics. But Lehrer himself did not have high hopes for the
political effects of his songs. In an interview in 1995, he said about his work, “I don’t think that it would change anybody’s
mind. I don’t think humor does that. I think it moves people a little, and
softens them up for the hard pitch. By its very nature, as I say, you have to
exaggerate, you can’t really make a strong point.” He stopped writing and
performing when it was no longer easy to be funny about politics in the mid-1960s. He felt out of touch with the
harsher protest politics of the Black Power movement and Vietnam War. He even
made fun of political folk songs in “The Folk Song Army”: “If you feel
dissatisfaction, Strum your frustrations away. Some people may prefer action, But
give me a folk song any old day.”
Some of Lehrer’s subjects are
no longer familiar. One of his funniest songs, “Vatican
Rag” mocks the Second Vatican
Council, the reforms of Catholic practice in the early 1960s: “So get down upon
your knees, Fiddle with your rosaries, Bow your head with great respect, And
genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!”
Politics today are angrier
than in Tom Lehrer’s song-writing heyday, exemplified by our angry President,
who seeks conflict wherever he can find it. It is harder to find political
humor that doesn’t seem partisan. Johnny Carson has become Stephen Colbert, as
each side watches its own form of news and laughs at its own jokes.
The guilty pleasures of Tom
Lehrer’s often gross humor seem antiquated in today’s world, where presidential
candidates compare the size of their penises and everybody drops F-bombs. His
performances in tie and jacket as he plays musical theater piano are quaint.
But his intellectual jabs at American culture, political or not, still retain
their sharpness. On the liner notes of a 1997 re-release of some of this songs,
Lehrer said
of his musical career, “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.”
One thing remains the same –
the inverted relationship between politics and humor. As Will Rogers
once said: “Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously
and the politicians as a joke.”
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, November 28, 2017
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