Spotlight: 1960s satirist Tom Lehrer resurfaces

Americans aren’t noted as satirists but it’s at least arguable that the British crop, led by David Frost and the Cambridge Footlights mob, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, were heavily influenced by Lehrer. Indeed Frost hired him to write songs for his Frost Report, and he was also the main songwriter for the US version of the groundbreaking That Was The Week That Was.

Lehrer is now 92, living quietly in California. The poet Philip Larkin marked 1963 as the year sex was invented, for Lehrer 1973 was when satire became obsolete with the Nobel Prize for Peace going to Henry Kissinger who, among other notable accolades, spied for the FBI on alleged communists as a student and went on to mastermind the carpet bombing of Cambodia in the Vietnam War.

Lehrer had actually given up writing and performing around six years before and had returned to academia. He didn’t miss the spotlight. "I don't feel the need for anonymous affection," he said. "If they buy my records, I love that. But I don't think I need people in the dark applauding.”

He wasn’t interested in promoting himself – “That’s not my job” – spurning all media interviews. “I read some of these things with people who will tell you about their abortions, and their affairs and their divorces and their breakdowns and their parents, and why are they doing that? And I'm sure if you asked them how much money they made last year, they'd tell you it's none of your business."

He grew in New York, of Jewish parents, a father who manufactured ties and a mother who took him to musical theatre, which sprang and nourished his interest in the form. The Broadway musical Let’s Face It by Cole Porter made an early impression on him.

In a musical twist of fate he was at a summer camp as a 10-year-old with the budding lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who was a couple of years younger than him, and Lehrer later joked that he had planned to write a musical about Sweeney Todd but Sondheim beat him to the punch 20 years later.

He was also a gifted mathematician, a child prodigy who went to Harvard at the preposterously young age of 15. After graduation in 1946 Lehrer went to work at the home of the nuclear bomb, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. One of his songs may have had its germination there, “We Will All Go Together When We Go, what a comforting fact that is to know. Universal bereavement, What a comforting achievement, Yes, we all will go together when we go.”

One of his most famous songs is Wernher von Braun, after the Nazi scientist who ended up not in prison or a hangman’s noose but leading the US rocket programme after the war. “Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's apolitical. ‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

It was rumoured, and perhaps Lehrer started it, that von Braun sued him for defamation but that wasn't true. He was, however, censored and banned copiously. In Australia the Boy Scout movement successful campaigned to have him barred from the country after a concert in Adelaide where he performed his song Be Prepared (the Scout motto), the lyrics of which go: “Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice, Unless you get a good percentage of her price.”

And, “If you're looking for adventure of a new and different kind, And you come across a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined, Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared. Be prepared!” All pretty tame nowadays.

It was a stint teaching at Harvard in 1953, where he entertained fellow professors and students with his songs, that he felt encouraged to spend $15 on a recording session, out of which came Songs by Tom Lehrer. He couldn’t get airplay for it because it was judged too controversial, so he flogged the record around the campus for $3. Interest spread by word of mouth. Or, as he put it, “My songs spread slowly. Like herpes, rather than ebola.”

In 1958, five years after the release of the debut album in the US, it was finally released in the UK and the BBC banned 10 of the 12 songs on it.

When his interest in writing and performing disappeared Lehrer went back to mathematics, joining the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1972, He taught there for almost 30 years, until his last maths class in 2001 on the topic of infinity. He still lives in the area and “hangs out”, as he put it, on the campus.

He is dismissive of any influence his music had. "I don't think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly,” he said. “It's not even preaching to the converted; it's titillating the converted ... I'm fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin kabaretts of the 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.”

But although he had apparently left the spotlight and song sheet for the blackboard he did not lose his withering observational edge. “I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush,” he said of the then US President. “I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.”

In 2012 the US rapper 2 Chainz sampled Lehrer’s song The Old Dope Peddler (“He gives the kids free samples, Because he knows full well, That today's young innocent faces, Will be tomorrow's clientele.”). In response to the record company’s request for permission to use the sample, Lehrer responded, "As sole copyright owner… I grant you motherf*****s permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?”

Now the rest of us (expletive deleted) can do what we want with his material.