Tom Lehrer

When I was talking about Spring the other day I found that I was quoting this to myself:

‘Spring is here, oh, Spring is here.
Life is skittles and life is beer.
I think the loveliest time of the year
Is the Spring, I do.
Don’t you?
Course you do.'

Do you know it? It’s a song which, despite its cheerful lyrics and happily waltzing tune, is called Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, written, performed and asked to be taken into consideration by Tom Lehrer.

Tom Lehrer, Professor Lehrer to give him his full title, because his day job was lecturing in mathematics, was one of those sixties liberal faculty types, who took pleasure in mocking the pleasures and the politics of the less intellectually gifted. He was – is – one of those brainy types who would knock off a song setting the table of the elements to the tune of I am the very model of a modern major-general, so that he was never stuck for a party-piece. All I can do is recite Albert and the Lion.

He’s like those old Oxford dons who argued about philosophy by means of limericks. Here are a couple discussing the relationship between perception and reality.

He can be, and often has been, criticised for sneering at easy targets like sentimental songs, racism, patriotism, the military-industrial complex, etc.

I discovered him when passing through my adolescent flirtation with cynicism and satire and was cultivating an air of world-weariness, something which stuck, I’m afraid. It was great fun, living with the cold war going on, to whistle in the dark to the tune of We will all go together when we go, consoling ourselves with lines like ‘There will be no more misery/When the earth’s one big rotisserie.’ So, despite all possible criticism of the great Tom, I still like him.

Surely it must be more than nostalgia for self-indulgent student revue days.

First of all, you’ve got to like someone who attacks, with what is after all gentle mockery, the complacencies and hypocrisies of people and their politicians. And the man is witty, with a nice touch of Jewish self-deprecation. His song mocking America’s National Brotherhood Week contains these lines:

All the Protestants hate the Catholics
All the Catholics hate the Protestants
All the Hindus hate the Moslems
- and everybody hates the Jews.

He likes to have fun with the English language, with inventive rhymes, such as these:

When you attend a funeral
It’s sad to think that sooner or’l
Later those you love will do the same for you
‘I have often thought it tragic
not to mention other adjec-
tives to think of all the weeping they will do

Or his piling up of rhymes in When You are Old and Grey.

Add to that his exuberant, even witty, piano-playing of his cleverly memorable tunes, often quite Berlinesque in that he provides two or three in the same song.

Add to that his natural wit. His introductory patter could be just as funny as the songs.

I was reminded of him the other day when Werner von Braun was the subject of a Times correspondence. Tom wrote an unusually angry song about this former Nazi, director of the V2 programme, and later ‘founding father’ of America’s space programme. Around 1960 a film was made about von Braun’s life. Predictably, posters around the country advertising the film, I aim for the Stars soon bore the added sub-title: ‘But sometimes I miss and hit London.’

Tom Lehrer gave up performing about forty years ago, probably bored and disenchanted and realising the truth of his admirer Peter Cook’s comments when he opened his Establishment Club. The Club, he said, was ‘modelled on those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.’