The greatest living American until this week has died at the age of 97. I refer to Tom Lehrer, the finest satirist of the 20th century. He’s the one who observed that satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the genius who put the entire periodic table of the elements to the tune of ‘I Am the Very Model of A Modern Major-General’ (Gilbert and Sullivan was his childhood obsession). He was a mathematician who could be as funny about maths and science as about poisoning pigeons in the park (yes he did) or contemporary pieties (‘National Brotherhood Week’).
If you haven’t yet registered his subversive lyrics, check out his 1967 concert in Copenhagen where the dapper Mr Lehrer gives a summary of his lifetime mission – ‘to extend adolescence beyond all previous limits’. But it wasn’t just adolescent subversiveness that made him compelling – though venereal disease (‘I Got It from Agnes’), masochism (‘The Masochism Tango’) and necrophilia (‘I’ll Hold Your Hand in Mine’) were grist to his mill. It was his appalling capacity to get right to the nub of unspeakable subjects in jaunty tunes and hilarious lyrics. They included the atom bomb, pollution and US foreign policy, about which he was all the more devastating in that he made people laugh. Need I say that he was Jewish, secular Jewish, the apotheosis of a whole popular tradition of black humour?
As he announced in that concert: although the Danes all speak English, they may not all speak American, so if anything in his lyrics escaped his audience he recommended they call the US embassy ‘where I’m sure they’ll have some useful suggestions for you’. He was a dangerous man because he was so funny, so light, so rebarbative, and he hit all his targets with the unerring accuracy of little drones, though there are no little drones that make you laugh even thinking about them.
If you want to recapture the angst of the western world at the prospect of nuclear annihilation, look up ‘We Will All Go Together When We Go’. It was preceded, like all his songs, by a little chat with the audience in which he recalled the observation: ‘“Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.” It always seems to me that this is precisely the sort of dynamic, positive thinking that we so desperately need in these trying times of crisis and universal brouhaha, and so with this in mind I have here a modern positive dynamic uplifting song. In the tradition of the great old revival hymns, this one might more accurately be termed a survival hymn.’
And then he launched into it:
…And we will all go together when we go.
What a comforting fact that is to know.
Universal bereavement,
An inspiring achievement,
Yes, we all will go together when we go.…We will all go together when we go.
All suffuse with an incandescent glow.
No one will have the endurance
To collect on his insurance,
Lloyd’s of London will be loaded when they go.…And we will all go together when we go.
Ev’ry hottenhot and ev’ry eskimo.
When the air becomes uranious,
And we will all go simultaneous.
Yes we all will go together
When we all go together,
Yes we all will go together when we go.
You won’t thank me for putting that your way, because once you’ve heard it, you can’t get it out of your head. What’s striking about that particular lyric is that although the nuclear threat is as acute as in Lehrer’s day (he did a song about proliferation too: ‘We’ll try to stay serene and calm, when Alabama gets the bomb’) the thing critics would pounce on is that reference to Hottentots, which just goes to show why we’re now incapable of satire. Indeed, in an interview with the New York Times in 2000, Lehrer observed: ‘When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn’t say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can’t say “girl”.’
He didn’t spare any institution, and invariably the targets rose to the bait. That was the case with ‘The Vatican Rag’, his critique of the liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council, though few traditionalists could have captured the crassness of the changes with the brevity of Lehrer: ‘Two, four, six, eight… time to transubstantiate!’ There were demonstrations led by Catholic clergy against that one. It’s still useful to have at the back of your mind when there’s some new attempt to make liturgy relevant to the times.
‘When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn’t say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can’t say “girl”.’
His output was considerable – 50 recorded songs, but over an astonishingly brief period in the 1950s and 1960s, roughly 1953-1965, though at the time of his interview in 2000 he was still on top of current affairs – his lyrics on partial-birth abortion, for his own amusement, were called ‘Bye-bye, Baby’. One reason he turned away from satire was the increasing earnestness of the young – all those protestors against Vietnam who were incapable of jokes and talked to themselves – but also because the world changed.
He recalled: ‘The liberal consensus, which was the audience for this in my day, has splintered and fragmented in such a way that it’s hard to find an issue that would be comparable to, say, lynching. Everybody knows that lynching is bad. Everybody knows that pollution is bad. But that’s already been done. But affirmative action vs quotas, feminism vs pornography, Israel vs the Arabs? I don’t know which side I’m on any more. And you can’t write a funny song that uses “on the other hand”.’
And that’s the awful truth: the shattering of the liberal consensus and the grim humourless activism which is now combined with the political correctness that would cancel his lyrics means that we shan’t have another Tom Lehrer because we don’t deserve one. He was radical to the end: in 2020 he abandoned any claim to copyright for any of his work. As he said on his website: ‘In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.’ How many radicals say that, ever?
He does leave a legacy. As he said once, as a younger man: ‘If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.’
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