R.I.P. Tom Lehrer
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"Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97", NYT 7/27/2025.
Nancy Friedman's skeet underlines who and what he outlived:
He outlived Henry Kissinger and New Math. RIP Tom Lehrer.
(Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a…— Nancy Friedman (@fritinancy.bsky.social) July 27, 2025 at 1:14 PM
Nancy commemorated his 97th birthday with a 3/9/2025 post on Strong Language, "Smut".
I'll add links to a couple of LLOG posts from 2009, "Rhyming 'orange'" and "Rhymes with language".
The Tom Lehrer Fandom Wiki has a complete list of links to (information about) all of his songs.
To close it off on an orthographical note, here's his Electric Company song, "Silent E".
Paul Clapham said,
July 27, 2025 @ 1:36 pm
Funny — his song The Elements just popped into my mind this morning (before I read this).
Barbara Phillips Long said,
July 27, 2025 @ 1:51 pm
Tom Lehrer had some amazing rhymes. My favorite was the totally unexpected “adjec-“ with “tragic” in the opening of We Will All Go Together When We Go:
When you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner o'
Later those you love will do the same for you. And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
Tives, to think ofall the weeping they will do. But don't you worry.
No more ashes, no more sackcloth,
And an armband made of black cloth
Will some day never more adorn a sleeve: For if the bomb that drops on you
Gets your friends and neighbors too, There'll be nobody left behind to grieve.
And we will all go together when we go. What a comforting fact that is to know. Universal bereavement,
An inspiring achievement,
Yes, we all will go together when we go.
…
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/we-will-all-go-together-when-we-go.pdf
Roscoe said,
July 27, 2025 @ 8:32 pm
And don’t forget his attempt at rhyming the unrhymable:
Eating an orange
while making love
makes for bizarre enj-
oyment thereof.
Chris Buckey said,
July 28, 2025 @ 2:20 am
RIP to a fellow Banana Slug.
Arthur Baker said,
July 28, 2025 @ 7:35 am
Always fondly remembered for his statement that political satire died when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Relatedly, who's going to get that prize this year?
bks said,
July 28, 2025 @ 9:12 am
Here he's given credit for inventing the "jello shot":
https://www.wearethemighty.com/popular/tom-lehrer-invented-jell-o-shots/
Robert Coren said,
July 28, 2025 @ 9:37 am
@Roscoe: I didn't know that one, but it makes me think of Ogden Nash, who was also prone to playful/improbable rhymes.
rosie said,
July 29, 2025 @ 3:19 am
@Barbara Phillips Long
Unexpected? I think funeral/sooner or l- had already shown how low he'd set the bar. Yes, he was fun of strained rhymes, wasn't he. Like Harvard/discarvered in The Elements.
Francois Lang said,
July 29, 2025 @ 3:55 pm
Re "The Elements": To celebrate the end of George W. Bush's second term, I penned the following and circulated it to friends in January 2009. References are obviously dated, but may jog some people's memories.
########################
There's WMD and Abu Ghraib, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Where Bush and Cheney started wars without the slightest exit plan.
There's Donald Rumsfeld, Al Gonzalez, and the White House blowing smoke,
The GOP then ran McCain and Sarah Palin—what a joke!
There's Val'rie Plame, Guantanamo, diplomacy that grossly failed.
Saddam Hussein, Karl Rove, Katrina, Michael Brown—he should be jailed.
Let's set aside the Constitution, disregard all human rights.
While royal presidential power soars to unknown dizzying heights.
Now AIG and Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
Bought toxic assets by the billion and then took a mighty whack.
Detroit with its lousy cars then threatened to go belly up,
But Henry Paulson bailed them out and told us taxpay'rs "Ante Up!"
There's waterboarding, wiretaps, Paul Wolfowitz and Larry Craig.
And climate change, Jack Abramoff, the Taliban and ideas vague,
The CIA and nine eleven, Kenneth Lay and Enron too,
Misunderestimation means that we the people got the screw.
There's Halliburton, medicare and Lewis Libby, terrorism.
Huge deficits, and fluorocarbons, anti-intellectualism,
No civil rights, but torture, lower taxes and creationism.
Enhanced interrogation and conservative immoralism.
Attorney firings, ANWR drilling, hanging chads, the NSA,
Indefinite detention, earmarks, ethanol and Tom Delay,
And FEMA trailers, big tobacco, stem-cell research, Tina Fey.
The subprime mortgage crisis, same-sex marr-i-age…how anti-gay!
Swift boating, Hatch Act violations, trashing emails, censorship,
Corruption, bal'nce of pow'r, Kyoto Protocols…dictatorship.
The Y2K election, and the throt'ling of the FDA,
And greenhouse gasses, global warming. Who cares? Not the EPA!
Abuse of power, North Korea, Harriet Miers and Roe v. Wade.
And enemy combatants, Enron, polar bears and foreign aid,
And immigration, habeas corpus, propaganda bought and paid,
With mission wholly unaccomplished, Double-U, let's let you fade.
These aren't the only sordid reasons, Dubya, we won't MISS YA;
There're many obvious others why you're such a terrib'l FAIL YA.
David Marjanović said,
July 30, 2025 @ 3:05 pm
Listen to the whole thing here to hear how the rhymes are handled. Bonus new word: uranious, rhyming with simultaneous.
HS said,
July 30, 2025 @ 8:35 pm
I've always loved Tom Lehrer. My father was a fan and saw him in concert here in Wellington, New Zealand in 1960. He also used to play his records at home. I think I could sing the whole of the Vatican Rag before I was ten, even though I didn't really know what it was about or know what "genuflect" or "transubstantiate" meant. (Actually, I still don't know what "transubstantiate" means). Like Barbara Phillip Long I love Lehrer's rhymes – the rhymes in songs like We'll All Go Together When We Go, the Wild West is Where I Want to Be, and Poisoning Pigeons in the Park are brilliant. (And, Rosie, the "strained" rhymes just add to the humour.) I also like his on-stage patter and song introductions – e.g. the quip "it is a sobering thought that by the time Mozart was my age he'd been dead for two years". How true, how very true….
If there are any Lehrer completists reading this, it seems he may (or may not) have written an "unofficial' song when he was in New Zealand (although it's unlikely to be of any interest to anyone outside New Zealand, and only of historical interest even in New Zealand). See https://dmdb.org/lehrer/lehrer.nash.html
ajay said,
August 4, 2025 @ 6:47 am
" it makes me think of Ogden Nash, who was also prone to playful/improbable rhymes."
And before him of WS Gilbert, of course, where it's often made clear that the character on stage is supposed to be making the song up as he goes:
"In short, when I've a smattering of element'ry strategy…
[long, agonised pause by singer]
[triumphantly] You'd say a better Major-General had never sat a gee!"
Victor Mair said,
August 5, 2025 @ 7:38 am
As a professor, Tom Lehrer was most closely associated with the University of Santa Cruz.
Here's a Wikipedia article on "Fight Fiercely, Harvard" that pays keen attention to linguistics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Fiercely,_Harvard