The Evil Genius of Tom Lehrer

An appreciation

Tom Lehrer—musician, mathematician, and master of the dark comedic arts—has died at age 97. The news was greeted with a degree of disbelief unusual for news of a 97-year-old man’s death, simply because for some of us Lehrer was the quintessential “Wait, he’s still alive?” guy. As some wag on Twitter put it, the “Wait, he’s still alive?” guy can’t die, by definition. If anyone could make you almost believe that, it was Tom Lehrer.

Lehrer spoke the love language of a particular sort of brainy misfit, of which my parents were two. Though they weren’t even born yet when he “hung up his piano” and returned to his ideal day job as a college math teacher/perpetual grad student (he gave up on his dissertation in 1965). I fondly remember my youthful initiation into the fan club, somewhere around when his work was enjoying a late noughties YouTube revival. My dad showed me this tape of 60-something Lehrer exhuming some math-related ditties (written in his bored Harvard years). Dad is a philosopher, but he could have been a mathematician, and he relished every hidden joke, which he had to explain to me because this was well before I embarked on my own very short-lived math “career.” Unlike Lehrer, I did finish my Ph.D., but if there was one thing I learned while doing a Ph.D., it’s that I wasn’t nearly as talented as so many people who’d chosen not to pay those particular dues. Some people operate on a plane of genius so far above me I can only crane my neck and admire from below, and Lehrer was one of them.

Lehrer’s catalogue has such a high ratio of classics to duds that it’s easy to forget he only published 37 tunes total, plus a handful of miscellaneous rarities and parodies. Perhaps his appeal is so enduring in part precisely because he cashed his chips and went home while people were still screaming for more. He nimbly avoided the risk of overstaying his welcome even a second past his expiration date, thus securing his place in the “classics” section of every brainy misfit’s record collection, which kept being rediscovered by subsequent generations. He’s the “Before so-and-so, there was…” of acerbic musical comedy, from Steve Martin to Weird Al and beyond. When Bo Burnham was becoming a hit with Gen Z, Lehrer was lurking in Mom and Dad’s stacks, waiting for the yooth to discover where this sort of thing really got started.