Song satirist Tom Lehrer dies aged 97

Tom Lehrer, the popular and erudite US song satirist who lampooned marriage, politics, racism and the Cold War, then largely abandoned his music career to return to teaching maths at Harvard and other universities, has died aged 97.

Friend David Herder said Lehrer died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. No cause of death was revealed.

Lehrer had remained on the maths faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz well into his late 70s. In 2020, he even turned away from his own copyright, granting the public permission to use his lyrics in any format without any fee in return.

A Harvard prodigy, having earned a maths degree from the institution at the age of 18, Lehrer soon turned his very sharp mind to old traditions and current events.

His songs included Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, The Old Dope Peddler (set to a tune reminiscent of The Old Lamplighter), Be Prepared (in which he mocked the Boy Scouts) and The Vatican Rag, in which Lehrer, an atheist, poked at the rites and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church.

Accompanying himself on piano, he performed the songs in a colourful style reminiscent of such musical heroes as Gilbert and Sullivan and Stephen Sondheim, the latter a lifelong friend.

Lehrer was often likened to such contemporaries as Allen Sherman and Stan Freberg for his comic riffs on culture and politics and he was cited by Randy Newman and “Weird Al” Jankovic among others as an influence.

He mocked the forms of music he did not like (modern folk songs, rock ‘n’ roll and modern jazz), laughed at the threat of nuclear annihilation and denounced discrimination. But he attacked in such an erudite, even polite, manner that almost no-one objected.

Lehrer produced a political satire song each week for the 1964 television show That Was The Week That Was, the US version of the ground-breaking topical comedy show that anticipated Saturday Night Live a decade later.

He released the songs the following year in an album titled That Was The Year That Was.

The material included Who’s Next?, an examination of which government will be the next to get the nuclear bomb … perhaps Alabama? (Lehrer did not need to tell his listeners that it was a bastion of segregation at the time.) Pollution takes a look at the then-new concept that perhaps rivers and lakes should be cleaned up.

His songs were revived in the 1980 musical revue Tomfoolery, and he made a rare public appearance in London in 1998 at a celebration honouring that musical’s producer, Cameron Mackintosh.