Without free speech, we could not tell who the idiots are!
That is a line almost worthy of Tom Lehrer, but I stole it from a YouTube channel that shows unspeakably awful puns and jokes every day. Because we all need to laugh more and remind our elites that we won’t be silenced and won’t stop laughing. The elites, the people who write the laws and call the cops on you are so freaked out that they are, yet again, cancelling free speech and jailing those that won’t comply. See Britain and Brazil; two countries sliding into some weird totalitarianism light as we sit here.
Speaking of freaking out the elites, a master of this genre is surely Tom Lehrer, who ranks among the first, best and baddest of darkly funny lyricists of the last century.
Tom Who? Or I thought he was dead? Might be what you’re thinking. Okay, let’s just clear up the latter: Lehrer is alive and well at 96, living in his old house in Cambridge Massachusetts, has just had a play about him mounted in London called Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You, by Francis Becket. And he still isn’t talking to anyone, including Becket who tried and failed to get an interview with this master of reclusivity.
Lehrer has been doing that ever since he gave up a brilliant international career as a musical satirist with a decidedly dark bent at the age of forty. And went back to teaching Math to humanities majors at university. I would give anything to learn Math from him since I am genetically handicapped in that field. Lehrer might have been able to save me from my eternal math perplexity. I suspect he was teaching humanities majors struggling with Math because he wanted to do good. I imagine this because aside from teaching math, Lehrer wasn’t interested in fame or money. He said he just wanted to have enough to live comfortably but like a perennial grad student. Which goal he achieved. And if you don’t believe that he didn’t care about money, have a look at his entire oeuvre complete with original songs and sheet music, free for anyone to download from this website: www.tomlehrer.com
I wonder what it would take to convince the old rockstars like the Stones, all millionaires, to do the same?
He was, aside from his creative gifts as a lyricist, a genius level mathematician who got into Harvard at 15 and graduated summa cum laude at 18, but never finished his Ph.D. He got bored with it, perhaps in the same way that he got bored with performing his wicked rhyming songs about the Bomb, Masochism, Pigeons, Old Age, WW3, incest, and other human failings. He was above all, someone who saw the world through a prism of high amusement as well as deep despair. A serious satirist who while sending us all up wants us to laugh about the perennially sorry state of the human race. That kind of combination can drive you insane and he is rumoured to have suffered a nervous breakdown at one time though you won’t find that bit of information anywhere online.
I know this from a conversation with the Canadian impresario Chris Donison who, long ago, actually rehearsed a show based on his songs, called Tom Foolery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomfoolery
According to him, the show was so bad he bailed on it though it was produced first in London and then in Toronto. Donison didn’t meet Lehrer either, but he certainly knows all the songs and thinks he flew a bit too close to the sun. Donison should know, being a composer, musician, lyricist and gifted pianist himself. On Lehrer’s ability to tickle the ivories, he said he played piano as though he was a different person from the one singing. A high degree of skill, just kind of in the background to his brilliant lyrics. And what lyrics they are; loaded with internal and external rhymes, alliterations galore and a kind of fiendish delight in pointing out inconvenient truths and piercing any and all pomposity. Though he fully agreed with Peter Cook whose sarcastic comment that the Berlin cabarets didn’t actually have any effect on the rise of the Nazis is worth remembering. That is the paradox of being a serious satirist, in a nutshell.
I think that there’s a reason why Lehrer is having a late life moment: his name means Teacher in German, and we are in desperate need of learning his irreverent take no prisoners laughter at the darkness. Laugh until you cry and then laugh again. The sickness of this age is surely taking everything, especially ourselves, too seriously and to its extreme. Lehrer did once say that you can’t be funny if you’re angry. Please note, all you demented activists on both sides of the spectrum, especially the ones who used to be journalists. Learn to laugh, take a deep breath, listen and learn a few Lehrer songs…for all our sakes.