The politics of Tom Lehrer: Noam Chomsky with a Piano?

Tom Lehrer died, aged 97, in late July.  Lehrer had written 37 (well, a few more) songs in the 1950s and 1960s, and on the basis of this is still (rightly in my opinion) regarded as one of the pre-eminent satirists of the 20th century. Interviewed in 2014 Weird Al Yankovic said “I wouldn’t call anybody today a modern-day Tom Lehrer…though he’s been inactive musically for several decades, I maintain that Tom Lehrer is our modern-day Tom Lehrer.”

There’s a very comprehensive Wikipedia article about him, so I won’t recap.  In this post I’ll just tease out some of the political implications (for want of a better word) in the bits of his music, that weren’t devoted to delighting in perversion (“Smut! I’m a market they can’t glut…”) and comedic cruelty (“I ache for the touch of your lips dear, but much more for the touch of your whips dear.”)

The political implications amount, mostly, to a classical liberal position – of suspicion of concentrated power, be it based on money, state power or military ‘might.’

His first album, Songs by Tom Lehrer, was recorded in January 1953, and became a viral sensation.  There are four songs on it that have clear political bite.

In The Old Dope Peddler he sings

“He gives the kids free samples

Because he knows full well

That today’s young innocent faces

Will be tomorrow’s clientele”.

Two things here.  First, the music was sampled, with Lehrer’s permission, in 2020, as per this letter in the Financial Times.

Second, it reminds me of Bill Mollison’s chapter in the book Pioneers of Change: Experiments in Creating a Humane Society, edited by Jeremy Seabrook

So, a crucial insight, about the creation of dependence as a means of control.

In The Wild West is Where I Want To Be, based on Lehrer’s time in the National Security Agency (not that he told anyone at the time!) he ruminates on how he’ll spend time among the yuccas and the thistles… “While the old FBI watches me”

(Lehrer also managed to get a sly reference to his Lobachevsky song into a paper he wrote there).

In My Hometown, Lehrer goes through various unsavoury behaviours and characters back in his “Hometown” (Lehrer grew up on Manhattan, by the way).

“The boy who burned down houses just to watch the glow

And nothing could be done, because he was the mayor’s son…”

I remember puzzling over this, till my dad explained that, well, I was 13 or so – what’s your excuse?

In “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie” Lehrer takes aim at the culture (and politics) of the Southern United States.

“I wanna talk with Southern gentlemen / And put my white sheet on again / I ain’t seen one good lynchin’ in years … The land of the boll weevil / Where the laws are medieval / Is callin’ me to come and nevermore roam.”

The album also includes “Be Prepared” (1).

Lehrer had published a second album  in 1959, More of Tom Lehrer. It included 

“We Will All Go Together When We Go” (about the coming nuclear apocalypse) and 

“It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier” (about the US army – Our captain has a handicap to cope with, sad to tell;

He’s from Georgia and he doesn’t speak the language very well!

He used to be, so rumour has,

The dean of men at Alcatraz,

 Lehrer toured Australia (see my article here) and New Zealand.  According to Wikipedia

“While in New Zealand, he penned lyrics critical of the All Blacks’ upcoming tour of Apartheid-era South Africa and Prime Minister Walter Nash‘s stance on it.^[52]”

As per some stellar research by Robbie Ellis, here’s a lyric.

When the team goes to South Africa, we all must act politely,

So to all their local problems, let’s be mute.

It might be a friendly gesture as a token of affection

If we brought along some blacks for them to shoot.

It seems it was never recorded….

The final album, “That was the Year That Was” has 14 songs, and most of them are, given that it was based on Lehrer’s contributions to a weekly satirical show.  I’ll just pick out three 

In “Send the Marines” Lehrer sums up the justifications used for US invasions (in this case the Dominican Republic).

For might makes right

And till they’ve seen the light

They’ve got to be protected

All their rights respected

Till somebody we like can be elected

In Wernher von Braun –

“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down,

That’s not my department says Wernher Von Braun”

Von Braun had, of course, been up to his neck in the Nazi V-weapon program, and had been brought to the US for his rocketry expertise.  More broadly, a lot of Nazis ended up getting to the US, under the auspices of Operation Paperclip. See also Instruments of Statecraft by Michael McClintock, which looks at how the US military made use of Nazi expertise in “counter-insurgency” (the polite phrase for ‘killing enough uppity peasants until the rest of them get the message.’)

And, of course, “Pollution”

Just go out for a breath of air
And you’ll be ready for Medicare
The city streets are really quite a thrill
If the hoods don’t get you, the monoxide will

Here’s a great video that was made of this.

After the 1960s

Lehrer’s retreat from the spotlight is well-documented. He basically had always found touring to be not that much fun, and meanwhile, the old liberal positions on which his humour relied were disintegrating. 

 “Things I once thought were funny are scary now,” he told People magazine in 1982. “I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.”

According to Wikipedia 

In 2003, Lehrer commented that his particular brand of political satire is more difficult in the modern world: “The real issues I don’t think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn’t ban land mines … I’m not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them.”^[33] Earlier, he had said: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.”^[77]

I think it’s a bit of a reach to call Lehrer “Noam Chomsky with a piano” as someone once did on the BBC.  I don’t know if Noam Chomsky ever said anything about Lehrer’s work – they knew each other at least socially, briefly. According to this,

“Lehrer’s raillery—part highbrow, part gutter, delivered with a deadpan smirk—made him a sensation among the members of the Cambridge academic set. “We had a common musician friend, Arthur Berger,” recalls linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky, “And I sometimes heard Lehrer perform live for a small group at Arthur’s home.” “

Anyway, vale Tom Lehrer – a mensch.

Source: The Guardian, May 26, 2024

Further reading

Smith, B. and Badejo, A. 2014. Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy’s Mysterious Genius. Buzzfeed, April 14

Suilebhan, G. and Gimbel, S. 2025. Tom Lehrer: American Cassandra. Moment Magazine, July 30

Footnotes

(1) Be Prepared is filthy.  It was one of the songs on the “play this and you’ll get arrested” list in South Australia.  According to Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy’s Mysterious Genius the original lyrics included “If you’re out behind the woodshed doing what you’d like to do, just be sure that your companion is a Boy Scout too.” Lehrer later changed that lyric “if you’re looking for adventure of a new and different kind, and you come across a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined “in a futile effort to get a mainstream record deal.”