TOM LEHRER RIP

Vice, depravity, treachery....fun

Tom Lehrer. Give the man a big hand.

Producers used to say that satire was what closed on Saturday but there was a time in the ‘sixties when it was hotter than Linda Lovelace.

What made satire more difficult than straight stand-up was the necessity to create new material as the news changed. It wasn’t enough to be foul-mouthed, sexist and racist, wonderful though these may be. One of the edgiest of these comics, Mort Sahl, came on stage carrying a folded newspaper, a signal of his topicality, and British TV’s most popular satire show, later cloned for the US, was called That Was the Week That Was.

The British satire quartet of Beyond the Fringe were an international stage hit, so effective that even the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, sneaked into a performance to see what they found so funny. Imitating his wearily weedy tone, Alan Bennett droned “Our policy in working with the Americans is quite clear. They put their point of view as clearly and forcefully as they can….and we agree with that.” So what else is new?

Anyway, this was the heyday of Tom Lehrer, who died last week. A Harvard maths professor who composed topical songs on often shocking subjects and sang them, grinning, in a reedy tenor, he turned his hobby into a money-spinner.

Lehrer widened the range of acceptable targets to include nuclear war, the Catholic church, abortion, sexual deviance.. you name it. As one of the British papers wrote in an admiring obit, “His songs were by turns gloriously vulgar, ludicrously macabre or ferociously political: I Got It from Agnes – “it” being a sexually transmitted disease; I Hold Your Hand in Mine, in which the held hand is no longer attached to a body; and We Will All Go Together When We Go, perhaps the best anti-nuclear weapons song ever written, praising “Universal bereavement/An inspiring achievement.”

Not to mention his touching tribute to that champion of intra-national scientific brotherhood, Werner von Braun.

Lehrer came to Australia, playing to half-full houses. I saw him in one of those cavernous Victorian town halls with a giant pipe organ lowering over him, seemingly in disapproval. Many in the audience didn’t know what to make of him. A few (empty) rows in front of us were a middle-aged couple and their glum teenage daughter. When Lehrer joked about a college friend “who majored in animal husbandry – until they caught him at it”, the three silently stood up and left. Farmers?

Lehrer didn’t mind the nay-sayers. They showed he was getting through to people, if only to scandalise them. In the early ‘sixties, however, he quit performing and composing, and, a decade later, dropped out entirely. As he said at the time, “They gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize! How could anything I wrote top that?”

Henry Kissinger, prince of peace. As through a glass, and darkly….

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