Today I got an e-mail from an AP reporter trying to confirm that Tom Lehrer was dead. I did not know if he was. To check I called Tom on his cell phone. He did not answer. I left a message asking if he was alive and telling him not to return the call he he was not. I guess he obliged. Eventually I was able to help the reporter track down someone who did know for sure that he had passed.
His passing has made me think a lot about him today, and I've mostly been thinking about how I disagree with how he has been categorized by the press. They call him a satirist, and I'm not sure he was. Surely what he did was funny, but different, and that's why his joy has become timeless. Satirists make fun of something cultural, of a time, they tend to become dated, and while there is some of that in Tom's music, what keeps one coming back to it, is how he shows the irony that is intrinsic to the world. In such he teaches us how to see the world for what it is, a place that words are used to hide things we can fix (pollution) we should avoid (world war III) or basic world view assumptions (I hold your hand in mine.)
He was a teacher, and that should be obvious, not only for his career as one, but since his name in German translates to teacher.
I have been a fan of Toms for about 45 years, since a Middle School friend named Jonathan Mazer exposed me to the albums of his, in turn his father had gotten when he was in college. We learned all the lyrics for songs like Lobachevsky (A song about plagiarism, that made plagiarism look good in an academic setting ... irony.)
Over the years I've thought a lot about irony. I have thought that irony connects well to the laws of Thermodynamics and that there is a Conversation of Irony, where irony can not be created or destroyed, only transformed.
When I was in High School I was home sick one day. On the TV I had a choice of soap operas or CSPAN. I chose CSPAN, and on it was James Brady, President Ronald Reagan's press secretary who announced a new project at a press conference. He announced a "Dual purpose boarder enhancement initiative and drainage ditch.". This was when questions from the press were actually answered, and over the next 10 or 15 minutes it became clear that we were building a dry moat at the Mexican boarder and we were telling the Mexican government it was a drainage ditch. This project was soon after killed, but the humor was never lost on me, nor the irony.
Let us not forget his actually amazing talent with lyrics, it's not surprising that as a kid he was friends with Steven Sondheim in a summer camp in upstate NY. Off the top of his head once made a rhyme with "orange."
I have to wonder hoe much of Tom's life was shaped by the fact that he was smarter than those around him and he had to grow up almost alone. He entered Harvard as a freshman at age 15. What does that mean, he entered High School at 12? When he was discovering that the opposite sex existed, his colleges were researching the opposite sex first hand. It's clear he wanted to fit in, and I can only assume that being the man on the piano let him be a part of the party, with out partying. He was Sheldon Cooper but with a sense of humor. Clearly while he was a success at music, at irony, and at Teaching, I have to wonder since he did not learn life from his contemporaries, if this is what had tempered him into looking at the world from the outside, and seeing it for what it was, an ironic place. A place we need to laugh at to see clearly.
So I bid farewell to Tom Lehrer, who was a teacher to me, who taught me that irony allowed you to see through the jargon and language that people use to obfuscate the world around us and that keeps us from seeing what is important. I wish everyone could see this was well as Tom did. I do because of his music.
-Greg Cohen 7/27/2025