Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.... Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful.
Let's have a few of them in memoriam.
There are a whole lot more, if you like the form. These are all national security oriented, which is how they originally came across my desk (as it were). There are plenty that are not.
3 comments:
After reading a biography of Wernher von Braun, I find Lehrer's satirical song about him to be rather unfair.
It wasn't important to the genre to be fair. As I commented on "The List" post below "...‘send the poor to war’ is an old folk song trope; it doesn’t matter if it isn’t true."
In high school ('69, '70?) somebody brought one of his records to English class and got permission to play it during rest period. Both sides, so I guess the teacher didn't mind.
He said that one reason he stopped was because everybody got so earnest--that he wanted laughter and not applause. But wikipedia's quotes from his later years suggests that he got earnest too.
Post a Comment