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‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?
In the 1950s and 60s, his songs stunned and delighted listeners with their irreverence, wit and nihilism. Then he gave it all up to teach mathematics. Lehrer is still alive at 96 – so I went in search of answers
In 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral. In the next year or two, Ed Monaghan introduced me to other comedians who were turning the complacent world of American comedy on its head: Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce. It’s simply a list of all the elements in the periodic table, sung to the tune of the Major General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance – “There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium / And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium” – and it’s virtually impossible for anyone without Lehrer’s gifts to sing it, although Daniel Radcliffe made a pretty good effort on a chatshow a few years ago.
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