About Tom Lehrer
Tom Lehrer (1928–2025), was a mathematician and satirist whose songs lampooned some of the most important targets of the 1950s and 60s: Nuclear Armament, Segregation, Family Values, Religion, Folk Music. He toured the world, selling over 2 million records and packing venues from cabaret clubs like the hungry i, to major concert stages like Carnegie Hall, Sydney Town Hall and The Royal Festival Hall in London.
His satirical lyrics were censored, banned, and debated in several houses of Parliament, until, at the height of his fame, Tom Lehrer simply stopped performing and returned to teaching noting that;
“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.”
In 2020, Tom Lehrer transferred his copyrights to the public domain, and posted all his recordings, lyrics, and scores on his website for anyone to explore and enjoy.
Here are a few of our favorites!
Ephemera
Tom Lehrer Live In Copenhagen (PBS)
Daniel Radcliffe sings The Elements… and books a job.
The Gambler’s Ruin with Soft-Hearted Adversary, an NSA paper co-authored by Tom Lehrer, containing a reference to a fictional paper, (from the lyrics of Lobachevsky): Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds.
Dope Peddler by 2 Chainz, featuring Tom Lehrer.
Tom Lehrer Obituaries: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Rolling Stone, The Harvard Crimson.
