Still With Us Tom Lehrer

Michael Barber celebrates the great iconoclast, now 88 and long retired from singing and songwriting.

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According to the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr the 1950s were the most humourless period in American history. Unless he was making a distinction between humour and wit, Schlesinger overlooked the mordant songs of his fellow Harvard alumnus Tom Lehrer, who at 88 is still, in his own words, ‘sliding down the razor blade of life’.

Lehrer began performing at a time when ‘there were certain things you couldn’t say in front of a girl’. But he was equal to the challenge. Sixty years on there is still something wicked – in every sense – about lines like this from his Boy Scout riff ‘Be Prepared’: ‘Don’t solicit for your sister/That’s not nice/Unless you get a good percentage of her price.’ He also rhapsodised about necrophilia and masochism, celebrated drug-dealing and plagiarism, and wrote a jaunty Revivalist hymn in praise of nuclear apocalypse: ‘Oh we will all fry together when we fry/We’ll be French fried potatoes by and by …’. No wonder Time denounced him as ‘un- American’, and the New York Times warned that ‘Mr Lehrer’s lyrics are not fettered by such inhibitory factors as taste.’