I first heard Tom some time in the summer of 1977, the year of Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee, in the classroom of a flamboyant and highly progressive English teacher who delighted in knocking the establishment. On his classroom walls, apart from the usual posters of literary greats, was a cover from the satirical paper Private Eye, with the headline ‘Windsor Woman in Massive Pools Win’. Below was a photograph of the Queen, with a speech bubble reading “It will not change my way of life”.
This was probably my introduction to satire; the second was when Dr Palmer pressed ‘play’ on the Tom Lehrer casette, and within seconds we were in hysterics. We didn’t know why, and I’m not sure how many catholics were in our class, but who cared. Those were less litigious days, and besides, ‘The Vatican Rag’—satirizing the recent modernization of certain aspects of the church’s ritual—was such a brilliant song:
‘Get in line in that processional
Step into that small confessional;
There the guy that’s got religion’ll
Tell you if your sin’s original
If it is, try playin’ it safer
Drink the wine and chew the wafer;
Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate!’
From the get-go, inventive multisyllabic rhymes like ‘religion’ll / original’ thrilled me. And there were other rhymes too, each one comically perfect. Like this one from ‘Smut’, a song mocking the very British preoccupation with sex (and alluding to the famous 1960 court-case in which Penguin Books were found not guilty of publishing obscenity):
‘Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby: re-reading Lady Chatterley.’
From the introduction to the same song comes this broken rhyme (‘broken’ not just because the last word is split in two, but because in neglecting the ‘rules’ it breaks our expectations). And of course it only really works because of Lehrer’s comic delivery:
‘Smut!
Give me smut and nothing but!
A dirty novel I can't shut
If it's uncut
And unsubt-tle.’
It was always the Lyrics
He was a fantastic parodist. No genre of popular music from any century was free from the prick of his pastiche: show tunes, the Viennese waltz, Scott Joplin’s ragtime, Gilbert and Sullivan, Irish ballads, you name it; and his skilful renditions provided much of the humour. But for me, it was always the lyrics.
I later learnt that throughout the sixties Lehrer had appeared regularly on the British satirical TV show ‘That Was The Week That Was (or TW3 as it was affectionately known), but we didn’t have TV at home, so I caught up with all this much later.
In particular, the relevance of his many songs about nuclear destruction had cooled off a bit by the time I heard them (I was born a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis).
But they remain some of the most brilliant pieces of political writing in the songbook. The one which I’ve chosen as the title of this encomium is perhaps the greatest of them all, and replete with those broken and polysyllabic rhymes that both lengthen and lighten the material:
‘When you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner or l-
ater those you love will do the same for you.
And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
tives, to think of all 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.’
The terrifying idea of what Lehrer calls ‘universal bereavement’ is set against an upbeat, patriotic tune that ends with these mock-celebratory lines.
‘When the air becomes uranious,
We will all go simultaneous.
Yes, we all will go together
When we all go together,
Yes. we all will go together when we go.’
Last words
My last words are reserved specifically for Lehrer’s last words: his ability to deliver some of the best punchlines you will ever hear. There are many examples I could give, but they only really work in the context of the preamble, so here is most of ‘So Long, Mom’
‘Little Johnny Jones he was a U.S. pilot,
And no shrinking violet was he!
He was mighty proud when World War Three was declared.
He wasn't scared, no siree!
And this is what he said on
His way to Armageddon:
So long, Mom, I'm off to drop the bomb,
So don't wait up for me.
But though I may roam, I'll come back to my home,
Although it may be
A pile of debris.
Remember, Mommy,
I'm off to get a Commie,
So send me a salami,
And try to smile somehow.
I'll look for you when the war is over …
An hour and a half from now.
That Viennese Waltz I mentioned earlier did Tom Lehrer great service when he wrote about European matters, especially the song ‘Alma’ in which he celebrates the life and death of Alma Mahler-Werfel, whose obituary he calls ‘the juiciest, spiciest, [and] raciest’ he had ever read. He also put it to good use in another of his Cold War specials, on the theme of Nazi-turned-NASA rocket scientist Wehrner von Braun, and it is with this prophetic punchline that I leave you today:
‘You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German, oder Englisch, I know how to count down—
Und I'm learning Chinese…" says Wernher von Braun.’