OPINION: Tom Lehrer – the musical comedy soundtrack of my childhood

Tom Lehrer died at the end of last month on my son’s ninth birthday. I first encountered the man’s work at around the same age, during music classes with an inspirational primary school teacher who didn’t live to see fifty, let alone the 97 years Lehrer managed. The songbook provided by our heroine was canonical as far as we could tell and contained the likes of Here Comes the Sun and Three Little Birds, the types of songs to be found in an FZY Shiron or emanating from tinny speakers on a Marbella beach.

No credit was affixed to any tune and thus the songs were all equal and, in our young heads, equally renowned. My favourite was The Hunting Song, a ditty whose first verse ended with the immortal words: “I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow, two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.” It was catchy and it was funny, everything I needed in the halcyon days before life got in the way.

Years later, at secondary school, a chemistry teacher would play a scratchy recording of a man reciting the periodic table of the elements with even catchier musical accompaniment before concluding, “These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard and there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered.” I did not know these songs were by the same man or that the latter was set to the tune of a Gilbert and Sullivan classic. It was the late 1990s and most of my mental energy was focused on the looming spectre of the Millennium Bug.

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Not long after this my paternal grandparents travelled to America and returned home with a CD by Tom Lehrer having heard a few of his songs played by a pianist in a hotel bar and enquired as to their origins. They thought perhaps I might take a break from the VHS tapes of Blazing Saddles and Mr. Bean and check out this album. I clicked play and could not believe what transpired. Not only were there recordings of both the aforementioned songs but a plethora of others, each and every one properly hilarious like a funny film. I laughed out loud repeatedly alone in the bedroom, blown away by this comedy genius.

Lehrer was not just a comedy genius but also a genius who did comedy. The way he addressed his audiences in 1950s nightclubs was so out of step with showbusiness protocol that one could instinctively tell he had justifiable disdain for musical comedy as a genre, rightly sensing he was above it. He would introduce the glorious springtime ballad, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, by telling the crowd, “I’d like to take you now on wings of song as it were and try and help you forget, perhaps, for a while, your drab wretched lives.” After another number, he observed, “It is a sobering thought that when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.”

That kind of comment should be indicative of the fact that this was the sultan of smartarses. Half a century before it would become a cornerstone of Stewart Lee’s act, Lehrer would delight in reading negative reviews of his work on stage. His apparent disdain for his audience, his critics and his chosen career path ultimately led to one of the more dignified decisions in showbusiness history. In the 1970s, he walked away from music to teach mathematics at MIT with the occasional class on musical theatre. He still couldn’t resist a good gag, though, and taught his final maths class in 2001, on the topic of infinity, before promptly retiring from academia.

He would very occasionally record a song in his later years, most notably the alternative holiday classic, (I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica. Generally, however, he was something of a reclusive figure, more than willing to be perceived as the Salinger of satire.

There was a mordant quality about Lehrer’s lyrics that went far beyond a Jimmy Carr joke in a way that suggested this man truly meant it. He did, after all, once write a “love song” containing the refrain:

“Your teeth will start to grow, dear, your waist will start to spread. In twenty years or so, dear, I’ll wish that you were dead.”

Perhaps to prove he meant it, Lehrer never married and had no children. What survives instead is the songs, which he generously transferred to the public domain in his final years and will be enjoyed for as long as people are around with any interest in music or comedy.