Tom Lehrer

Born on April 9, 1928, Tom Lehrer displayed an early knack for lampooning the popular tunes of his era while simultaneously acquiring piano skills. He departed New York City in 1944 for mathematical studies at Harvard, where he completed a master’s degree in just three years and continued as a graduate student until 1953. While still enrolled, he assembled The Physical Revue, a set of campus-staged academic song parodies that premiered in January 1951, followed by a revised version in May 1952. Lehrer also performed these pieces at Cambridge, Massachusetts coffeehouses and student events; mounting requests for a permanent recording led him to spend fifteen dollars on studio time, yielding the privately pressed 10-inch album Songs by Tom Lehrer in a limited run of four hundred copies.

The pressing sold out immediately, and copies traveled with Harvard students returning home for Christmas break, circulating far beyond their intended regional audience in a manner Lehrer later likened to herpes. Nationwide demand prompted multiple additional pressings, ultimately moving an astonishing 350,000 units, propelled by numbers such as “I Hold Your Hand in Mine,” which recounts a man severing his girlfriend’s hand to savor her fingertips, the sprightly “Irish Ballad” detailing a murder spree, and “My Home Town,” which depicts a community where killers instruct schoolchildren and elderly degenerates run the candy store.

Drafted into the Army in 1955, Lehrer received an honorable discharge two years later. In 1959 he issued More of Tom Lehrer, spotlighting “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Masochism Tango”; the identical repertoire was captured live at Harvard and released concurrently as An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer. A subsequent European tour produced the concert album Tom Lehrer Revisited, presenting fresh live interpretations of the original LP’s material. Yet a string of contentious Australian dates, reacting to his brand of “sick” comedy, convinced him to withdraw from performance and resume full-time teaching.

He resurfaced briefly in early 1964 as a songwriter for NBC’s satirical news program That Was the Week That Was. After the series concluded the following year, Lehrer committed the program’s songs to disc on an identically titled album that included the provocative “Vatican Rag.” The Reprise label secured his services with this release and also undertook reissues of his earlier self-released titles; to rectify the original master’s sonic shortcomings, he re-recorded Songs by Tom Lehrer before again stepping away from entertainment. His catalog nevertheless received regular airplay on the Dr. Demento radio program from the 1970s onward, establishing him as the show’s second-most-requested artist ever, surpassed only by Weird Al Yankovic.

Lehrer’s later forays into performance proved fleeting: he supplied a dozen songs for the 1972 children’s series The Electric Company, refreshed earlier material for the 1980 stage revue Tomfoolery mounted by Cameron Mackintosh of Cats renown, and contributed occasional pieces to Garrison Keillor. He maintained a mathematics professorship at the University of California at Santa Cruz and, at age seventy-two, saw his complete recorded output assembled by Rhino Records in the three-CD anthology The Remains of Tom Lehrer issued in 2000.