Tom Lehrer: Redeeming Social Importance

He is a college math instructor by vocation and a songwriter by avocation. Yet Tom Lehrer, now in his seventies, remains an inspiration for satirists everywhere, thanks to the spoofs and send-ups he composed during the '50s and '60s. Known to a fresh generation of humor fans thanks to the "Dr. Demento" radio show, Lehrer combined a Cole Porter-esque flair for virtuosic rhyme with a Vaudevillian's musical instincts.

But as the handsomely packaged Rhino reissue set "The Remains of Tom Lehrer" amply demonstrates, he was no mere well-heeled precursor of Weird Al Yankovic. Lehrer certainly cranked out his share of engaging trifles (like the cheerfully murderous "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," a Demento staple), but much of his work is surprisingly trenchant, especially given the era during which it was composed.

As an impressionable youth drawn to ambitious lyrical constructions (notably Porter, Ira Gershwin, Hal David and Elvis Costello) and anarchic humor (Monty Python, Mel Brooks, The Goon Show), I found in Lehrer a kindred spirit. He took on hot-button issues (racism, war, pornography, small-town hypocrisy) with an uncanny blend of erudition, disdain and self-mockery. Best of all, his rhymes were dazzling, whether elegantly symmetrical or English-mangling and groan-worthy.

Two LPs I first discovered in my parents' collection, "Songs by Tom Lehrer" and "That Was the Year that Was," contain the lion's share of his compelling work. The first, a 10-inch, 22-minute collection recorded in 1953 at the extravagant cost of $15, is in some ways the most impressive, as the youthful math wizard's transgressive sensibility takes on American mores in the dark days of McCarthyism. The second, recorded live in San Francisco in 1965 to capitalize on the notoriety Lehrer's songs achieved on the TV show "That Was the Week that Was," remains vital even after much of its "topical" subject matter has faded from view.

"Songs by" kicks off with "Fight Fiercely, Harvard," an amusingly mild-mannered football anthem that's still regularly sung in Cambridge, Mass. But it's with "The Old Dope Peddler" that we get an indication of how wickedly ahead of his time Lehrer's wit really was: "He gives the kids free samples," goes the sweet, slightly plaintive tune, "because he knows full well/That today's young, innocent faces/Will be tomorrow's clientele." Here, as elsewhere, he uses conservatism's favorite artistic mode, nostalgia, to deflate phony values and expose everyday horror.

The same applies to "My Home Town," a sweet little ditty about the perverts, murderers, prostitutes and other "super-special just plain folks" hiding beneath the wholesome American surface of the '50s. But how would the pious "Southern heritage" types then (or now) react to the furiously upbeat "I Wanna Go Back to Dixie?" It alternates all the clichés of "Swanee River" with lines like this one: "I wanna talk with Southern gentleman/Put my white sheet on again/I ain't seen one good lynchin' in years."

"That Was the Year" sends satirical arrows in the direction of politicians like reactionary showbiz vet George Murphy and emasculated Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, German nuclear scientist Wernher von Braun ("a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience") and other figures rarely discussed nowadays. They are all gems in their own way, but contemporary audiences are more likely to cleave to "The Vatican Rag," which boasts brilliant couplets like "make a cross on your abdomen/When in Rome do like a Roman" and a vigorously inappropriate musical setting. Or "Smut," a pro-pornography paean for the ages: "Stories of tortures/Used by debauchers/Lurid, licentious and vile/Make me smile." Elsewhere in the latter stirring march, he proclaims: "As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense/To be smut it must be utterly without redeeming social importance."

"National Brotherhood Week" casts a jaundiced eye on publicly sanctioned togetherness when "The Protestants hate the Catholics/And the Catholics hate the Protestants/And the Hindus hate the Moslems/And everybody hates the Jews."

With "Who's Next," Lehrer addresses nuclear proliferation - rather presciently, as many of the nations speculated upon have since actually joined the nuclear club - and concludes with a reductio ad absurdam: "We'll try to stay serene and calm/When Alabama gets the bomb." Yet his barbs aren't reserved entirely for the right; "The Folk Song Army" skewers the self-satisfaction of soldiers "in the fight against poverty, war and injustice."

There's much more in this generous collection, including - in their entirety - "More of Tom Lehrer" ("Pigeons," "Oedipus Rex," "The Masochism Tango," "We Will All Go Together When We Go"), two live albums revisiting his studio recordings and songs Lehrer penned for the children's show "The Electric Company."

All in all, it's a near-exhaustive collection of the pointed and the pointless, the astute and the absurd. Lehrer may have retreated to the classroom for the most part (though he has reemerged somewhat to publicize the box set), but his work stands as testimony to what can happen when a bracing intellect allows itself a flight of fancy.

--Simon Glickman