My Evening Not Wasted with Tom Lehrer

Remembering Tom Lehrer: Professor, Satirist, Musician, Mathematician and Mensch

When I read that Tom Lehrer passed at 97, my thoughts went back to the nearly life-long admiration I had for him and the one time I got to spend a relaxed evening in his company.

They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes because you’ll only be disappointed. They are wrong. In this case, Tom Lehrer was wrong when he made that remark during our dinner together. A dinner that I cooked. (Menu available upon request)

Spending three hours with one of my childhood heroes and inspirations was a genuine treat. He was relaxed, affable and witty. Some of the wit was not created in real time during our evening but was still fresh and insightful to me. I, of course, asked him why he had stopped touring? He replied, “I was on the road for ten years, and once you’ve played Cleveland, there’s really no good reason to do it again.” Made sense.

This standard of avoiding repetition didn’t apply to his teaching. He kept teaching advanced mathematics at both Harvard and UC Santa Cruz. Personally, I would have avoided repeating advanced math courses—especially since I had repeated basic algebra twice. He also taught Broadway Theater. This was not surprising since both his musical performances and lyrics revealed a deep knowledge and love of music in general and Broadway in particular. Satire, good satire demands mastery of the subject being parodied. Lehrer certainly had that mastery.

Still, it must be a unique combination that allows one to teach both math and music at elite institutions of learning. That combo served my son, Adam, several years later when as a Banana Slug (student at UC Santa Cruz) he took courses with Professor Lehrer in both advanced math and Broadway theater.

My relationship with Lehrer began when I was about 10 and discovered his first album, Songs of Tom Lehrer, amongst my parents’ records. He had me at “Be Prepared (That’s the Boy Scouts Marching Song).” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” sealed the deal, while “Lobachevsky” made me develop my memory skills by being able to sing both forward and in reverse the Russian cities of Minsk, Pinsk, Omsk, Tomsk, Akmolinsk, Alexandrovsk, Petropavlovsk and Dnepropetrovsk.

When Lehrer announced a concert at UCLA for October 31, 1959, I immediately bought tickets. It was a Halloween to remember. The concert began with some guy coming on stage and giving a florid introduction to Lehrer, whom he characterized as “as a leading satirist, a gifted musician and a very talented performer.” This guy then walked over to the piano, sat down and before singing his first song, remarked, “I save a fortune by not having to pay someone to introduce me.” Music and merriment ensued.

Though totally bereft of musical talent, I wished to be able to emulate him—both his musicianship and satiric wit. I have made a stab at the wit but didn’t draw much blood. Even the low bar of talk-singing satiric lyrics to anything vaguely resembling a melody, key or pitch, completely eluded my capture. I had to be simply a fan.

I memorized nearly all the songs from Tom Lehrer’s Songs to An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, as well as This Was the Week that Was. I didn’t set out to memorize the lyrics, but back then, when my brain was young and sponge-like, it was automatic. Now, naturally (Damn Nature!) my brain is no longer sponge-like, just spongy. Still, Lehrer’s witty words remain. And they still speak to me. They’d probably sing to me if they had any confidence that I’d capture their melody.

His songs sing witty but pointed challenges to our hypocrisies. National Brotherhood Week flays our attitudes on civil rights. We Will All Go Together When We Go embraces a nuclear holocaust with humor and mockery. “We’ll all go together when we go, we’ll be fused in an incandescent glow…when the air becomes uranious, we will all go simultaneous…Yes we’ll all go together when we go.” The Masochism Tango introduced this young and naïve boy to S and M. I hold Your Hand in Mine opened a road to Necrophilia—a road not taken. He was, after all, an educator as well as an entertainer.

If you see any disturbing psychological issues in his work, just turn to Freud and Lehrer’s Oedipus Rex. “You may have heard of his quaint complex, his name appears in Freud’s index, because he loved his mother.”

Happily, for Professor Lehrer, I resisted trying to prove my fanboy status by singing or reciting his oeuvre. Though I did confess that between him and Mort Sahl, I was moved towards aspiring to humor that provoked more than laughter, but also stimulated thought, introspection and even learning that might lead to both personal and societal change. I told him that he and Sahl influenced me to identify as an “Iconoclast.”

In fact, when I performed stand up, I billed myself, with Mort Sahl’s permission, as Jon Dobrer, Iconoclast. That appeared on the marquis at Coffee and Confusion and at Top of the Tangent in 1963, and at The Balladeer in 1964. I picked it up again in 2016 for a couple of concerts at The Ice House.

I shared with Lehrer that my great fear was not finding Icons worthy of being “clast” (cast down and broken). He agreed. Humor, at its best, is about more than getting laughs. It can be about by-passing our socially implanted censors and having the experience of helpless laughter when we recognize a truth, a lie or a hypocrisy.

Tom Lehrer was wrong about one thing. I met one of my heroes, and I was not disappointed.