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Thomas Andrew (Tom) Lehrer (born April 9, 1928) is
an United States|American singer-songwriter,
satire|satirist, pianist, and
mathematics|mathematician.

==Musical career==

As an undergraduate student at Harvard University,
he began to write comic songs to entertain his
friends, including Fight Fiercely, Harvard (1945).
Those songs later became The Physical Revue.
Influenced mainly by the musical theater, his
style consisted of parodying the then-current
forms of popular song. For example, his
appreciation of list songs (à la Danny Kaye's
"Stanislavski") caused him to set the names of
Elements song|the chemical elements to the tune of
Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major General's Song".

Inspired by the success of his performances of his
songs, he paid for some studio time to record an
album, Songs by Tom Lehrer, which he sold by mail
order. Self-publishing|Self-published and
unpromoted, the album, which included the macabre
("I Hold Your Hand In Mine"), the lewd ("Be
Prepared"), and the mathematical ("Nikolai
Ivanovich Lobachevsky|Lobachevsky"), became a
success via word of mouth. With a cult hit, he
embarked on a series of concert tours and released
a second album, which came in two versions: More
Songs by Tom Lehrer was studio-recorded, and An
Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer was recorded live
in concert.

By the early 1960s Lehrer had retired from touring
(which he intensely disliked) and was employed as
the resident songwriter for That Was The Week That
Was, a satirical TV show. An increased proportion
of his output became overtly politics|political,
or at least topical, on subjects such as pollution
("Pollution"), Vatican II ("The Vatican Rag"),
race relations ("National Brotherhood Week"),
American militarism ("Send the Marines") and
nuclear proliferation ("Who's Next?"). He also
wrote a song which satirized the alleged amorality
of Wernher von Braun. A selection of these songs
was released in the album That Was The Year That
Was.



There is an urban legend that Lehrer gave up
political satire when the Nobel Prize/Peace|Nobel
Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in
1973. He did say that the awarding of the prize to
Kissinger made political satire obsolete, but has
denied that he stopped doing satire as a form of
protest, and pointed out that he had stopped doing
satire several years earlier.

In the 1970s he concentrated on teaching
mathematics and musical theater, although he also
wrote the occasional educational song for the
children's television show The Electric Company.
In the early 1980s, Tomfoolery, a revival of his
songs on the London stage, was a surprise hit.
Although not its instigator, Lehrer eventually
gave it his full support and updated several of
his lyrics for the production.

In 2000, a CD box set, The Remains of Tom Lehrer,
was released by Rhino Entertainment. It included
live and studio versions of his first two albums,
That Was The Year That Was, the songs he wrote for
The Electric Company, and some previously
unreleased material, accompanied by a booklet
containing an introduction by Dr. Demento and
lyrics to all the songs.


== Lehrer the scholar ==
Lehrer earned his BA in mathematics (Magna Cum
Laude) from Harvard University in 1947, when he
was eighteen. He received his MA the next year,
and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.  He taught
classes at MIT, Harvard and Wellesley
College|Wellesley. He remained in Harvard's
doctoral program for several years, taking time
out for his musical career and to work as a
researcher at Los Alamos, New Mexico.  He joined
the Army from 1955 to 1957, working at the
National Security Agency.  All of these
experiences eventually became fodder for songs: 
"Fight Fiercely, Harvard", "The Wild West Is Where
I Want To Be" and "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a
Soldier", respectively.

In 1960, Lehrer returned to full-time studies at
Harvard, receiving a PhD in mathematics. In 1972,
he joined the faculty of the University of
California, Santa Cruz, teaching an introductory
course entitled "The Nature of Mathematics" to
liberal-arts majors—"Math for Tenors",
according to Lehrer. He also taught a class in
musical theater.

== Lehrer's influence on rock music ==

While Lehrer professed to hate rock and roll
—referring to it as "children's records" in
the intro to "Oedipus Rex"— his literate
satiric style clearly influenced Frank Zappa.

Fans of rapper Eminem have also noted some
similarities in Eminem's style to that of Lehrer.
The style comparison is best evidenced on Eminem's
South Park parody "The Kids" with its piano
backing, clever use of syntax and off-beat
rhyming, and even references to torturing small
animals similar to that of Lehrer's notorious
"Poisoning Pigeons In The Park".  One can also
draw a parallel to the singer/songwriter Mary
Prankster, whose oeuvre includes a feminist
reading of Hamlet ("Green Eggs and Hamlet"); a
satire of a pastoral idyll ("Blue Skies over
Dundalk"), reminiscent of "Poisoning Pigeons";
"Student Loan", which echoes Lehrer's "Bright
College Days"; and "Tempest", whose style recalls
Lehrer's love of rhyming series (e.g., "Poisoning
Pigeons" and "When You are Old and Gray").

== Reviews selected by Lehrer for his liner notes
==

*"Plays the piano acceptably" - Oakland Tribune
*"More desperate than amusing" - New York Herald
Tribune
*"Mr. Lehrer's muse does not suffer from such
inhibiting factors as taste." - New York Times
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer_in_Program

==External links==

*http://home.teleport.com/~osh/leher.htm Tom
Lehrer: The man, his myth and his music
*http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/ The
complete Tom Lehrer lyrics collection
*http://php.indiana.edu/~jbmorris/FAQ/lehrer.disco
.html Discography of Tom Lehrer
*http://www.theonionavclub.com/feature/index.php?i
ssue=3619&f=1 Interview with the Onion AV Club
(contains comments on Kissinger story)
*http://www.tomlehrer.org A Tom Lehrer and Tom
Foolery web page
*http://www.privatehand.com/flash/elements.html A
flash animation of his Elements song
*http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/jmazner/le
hrhtml.html Tom Lehrer: The Political Musician Who
Wasn't
*http://www.archive.org/details/lehrer A video
recording of five songs performed by Lehrer (for
Irving Kaplansky in 1997)
*http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2000-04-19/feature
.html An interview with SF Weekly
*imdb-name|name=Tom Lehrer|id=0499875