How Tom Lehrer Escaped the Transience of Satire
Satire, George S. Kaufman famously said, is what closes on Saturday night. Meaning, of course, that it has a limited run because of its intrinsically circumscribed interest. To this, one might add a further principle: even if a piece of satire makes it to the Wednesday matinée, it will do so by being so precisely on target, and so specific in its targets, that it should have no chance of sustaining itself after whatever it was firing at is forgotten. A narrow bull’s-eye, surely, precludes a wide range.
Yet, in truth, satire—at least satire of great quality—lives just as long as any other kind of art. It keeps its objects alive by lampooning them and, wrapping itself around the subject, fossil-like, replaces the original substance with its own material. Of no satirist was this truer than the great American songwriter Tom Lehrer, who died on Saturday, and whose firefly-brief targets are still alight mostly through the mockery he aimed at them. By the oddest of chances, this writer was playing a Tom Lehrer album to some youngish friends over the weekend, unaware that he was dying, or, to be perfectly honest, that he was still alive, and they responded immediately even when the materials were alien.
The album I played, recorded live in 1965, is Lehrer’s best, and even its title, “That Was the Year That Was,” illustrates the preservative properties of satire; it riffs on the title of a short-lived American TV show, “That Was the Week That Was,” adapted from an English show that had been a big hit. The subjects of “T.W.T.Y.T.W.” are indeed mostly unfamiliar now: there’s a song mocking George Murphy, a minor star of Hollywood musicals who had become a senator that year, preceding Ronald Reagan in being an actor turned California politician. Indeed, the stirrings of Reagan’s political ambition—he had yet to stand for office but had been a vocal Barry Goldwater supporter the year before—are mentioned in the song’s preliminary patter, to incredulous laughter from the audience. (The joke now gets a different laugh.) Then there’s one on the struggles of the liberal hero Hubert Humphrey as Lyndon Johnson’s Vice-President—and who remembers Humphrey now or, even if they do, knows that he was once a liberal hero? Another, the “MLF Lullaby,” records a fleeting controversy about a NATO proposal for a “multilateral force” of internationally crewed nuclear warships and submarines. The proposal went nowhere but has been rescued from oblivion by Lehrer’s observation that it would involve West Germany’s having access to nuclear weapons:
You don’t need to know anything about the M.L.F. (and doubtless some people in the original audience didn’t) to get the joke. In the same way, if you don’t know who Wernher von Braun—the German rocket scientist who worked for the Nazis and then for us—was, you will know all you need to from Lehrer’s ballad to him:
This self-contained quality—the songs deliciously fixing their subjects in formaldehyde—is part of what keeps Lehrer’s work alive. Besides, some of his targets actually are enduring—as in the anthem to the vacuity of National Brotherhood Week, which resonates all the more now, when we are only more deeply stuck in empty pieties. Similarly, when he introduces his “war song” for World War Three, he explains that if there are to be any songs from that conflict “we’d better start writing them now.”
Lehrer’s gifts included an extraordinary and easily overlooked musicality, the secret sauce of his satire. One simple reason his songs endure is that, for all that they are written for their words, it’s hard to stop humming their tunes. His brilliance as a pianist kept him from becoming repetitive, particularly because he had such a remarkable talent for musical pastiche, flitting with ease from Broadway to marches, lieder, calypso, Christmas songs, folk ballads, flamenco, Viennese waltzes, Mozart, modern jazz, ragtime, and Gilbert and Sullivan. Meanwhile, the fact that he once adapted an actual Gilbert and Sullivan number for a song made up entirely of the names of the elements of the periodic table points to his other astonishing gift— he was not just a funny lyricist but an expert one, as flexible in his prosody and as virtuosic in finding unexpected rhymes as Stephen Sondheim, a onetime summer-camp companion of his:
Or in “The Vatican Rag”: “Do whatever steps you want if / You have cleared them with the pontiff.” Patterns of inner rhyme as beautifully worked out and narratively right as anything in “Follies” abound, as in the delicious “Smut,” which was prompted by the relaxing of anti-obscenity laws by the Warren Court:
His masterpiece was doubtless his ballad tribute to Alma Mahler Werfel, the legendary Viennese socialite, muse, and sometime composer who, as Lehrer puts when introducing the song, “had in her lifetime managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in Central Europe.” Focussing his song on her three husbands—the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the author Franz Werfel—Lehrer captured every turn in perfectly resourceful rhyme:
There have been serious attempts to write an Alma musical, a good idea on the surface, but they have foundered on the fact that no two-act show can possibly be as good as Lehrer’s three-minute song.
Lehrer mostly stopped performing and recording in the nineteen-seventies and retreated, or perhaps advanced, into life as a full-time professor of math in the University of California system, although he was the subject of several revues and revivals afterwards. (One was called “Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You,” in honor of the response sent by Lehrer to the producers.) Among his fans, his walking away from it all is part of his legend. Why did he stop? He liked to claim that current events had overtaken his art—“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” he once said and often repeated —and doubtless he had personal reasons, too. A friend who saw him just a few weeks ago at his last home, in Cambridge—having studied and taught at Harvard, he had the Crimsonite’s residual affection for the place—recalls that, still in terrific intellectual shape, he seemed utterly unmarked by any neediness with regard to contemporary fame. Mostly, he spoke, fondly, of Broadway musicals sought out and seen. Rightly prizing the work of Frank Loesser, he particularly relished a revival of “ How To Succeed In Business Without Even Trying” that starred Daniel Radcliffe—and had been pleased to discover that Radcliffe was a Lehrer fan who had used some prolonged stage time during “Equus,” when he had to cling to the floor in the fetal position, to memorize “The Elements.” Lehrer even had a few affectionately hard words about his campmate Sondheim’s rhyming, citing a few as mere “printers’ rhymes.”
Imagine being still more fanatic about rhyme than its legendary master! Maybe this trait had something to do with a mathematician’s distaste for anything even slightly messy or misshapen. And so perhaps, in the end, there’s no mystery to the mystery. A mathematician’s mind was content with a few perfectly-solved equations. Although Americans take for granted that fame, once tasted, is addictive, it is possible simply not to want to do it anymore. Some lucky people just don’t need the constant show-biz buzz of approval. Show biz has its indignities, too—and what life is more undignified than that of the satiric coffeehouse-and-cabaret circuit?—and some people, having tasted glory once or twice, find that they can get on fine without it. Silence is as idiosyncratic as talent, and we can be grateful for what we’ve got.
