Lehrer, Tom
Entry updated 2 March 2026. Tagged: Music, People.
(1928-2025) US Satirical songwriter and performer, as well as a professor of mathematics and musical theatre at various American universities in the mid-twentieth century. Known for his unique blend of upbeat sarcasm and black Humour, Lehrer was a major influence on later performers like Weird Al Yankovic. During live performances, Lehrer's nicely-coiffed hair, glasses, suit, and bow tie heightened the dissonance between his outward persona and the hilarious and sometimes grotesque lyrics of his songs. While Lehrer sang about everything from the army, Mathematics and masochism to Physics, venereal disease, and murder, some of his most popular songs of the Cold War era had to do with World War Three.
Lehrer started writing satirical songs while at Harvard in the 1940s and 1950s. From 1951 to 1952, Lehrer and colleagues in the physics department organized a show called The Physical Review, for which Lehrer wrote several songs about atomic bombs and the threat of nuclear war (see Atomic Platters; Bill Haley and His Comets). "Relativity" (to the tune of "Personality" by James Van Heusen) comforted listeners with the thought that "if you are near when atom bombs appear, / And you're reduced to a pile of debris, / You'll know it's largely due to – Relativity." (See Relativity.) "Fugue for Scientists", to a tune from Guys and Dolls, cheerily notes that "The atom bomb's a bit / of genius you'll admit, / Just think of all the people we've killed with it." In preparation for his stint as a researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, Lehrer wrote "The Wild West is Where I Want to Be" on Songs by Tom Lehrer (1953) imagining a cowboy looking forward to viewing all of those exciting nuclear bomb tests in the desert. "We Will All Go Together When We Go" on More of Tom Lehrer (1959) offers more consolation about the threat of nuclear annihilation, since, after all, we will all "go together". "The Elements", also on More of Tom Lehrer, is a jaunty little song that names every Element known up to that time, set to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General".
Continuing the theme of nuclear war, Lehrer wrote four songs for the short-lived NBC satire show That Was the Week That Was (based on the 1962-1963 UK show with the same title) from 1964 to 1965. By this time, musicians like Bob Dylan had also written songs about nuclear Holocaust and its aftermath, including "Talkin' World War III Blues" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" (1963). Of course, Lehrer's were more upbeat. "So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)", "Who's Next?" and "MLF Lullaby" imagined soldiers giddily rushing off to fight the next world war and the complex political game of deterrence, respectively. "Wernher von Braun" poked dark fun at the Nazi rocket scientist von Braun who was persuaded to work for the US after World War Two: "Once the rockets are up, / Who cares where they come down? / That's not my department, / Says Wernher von Braun."
Lehrer took the opportunity, at various points in his career, to skewer the obsession with putting humans on the Moon. In his introduction to a live version of "Wernher von Braun" he mentions US efforts to "spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon". In his song "(We're Gonna Put) a Man on the Moon" – performed on That Was the Week That Was (27 April 1965) – Lehrer sarcastically dismisses a number of arguments for spending taxpayer money on Earth's issues (like floods along the Mississippi River) rather than the noble moon-landing cause. [RSCo]
Thomas Andrew Lehrer
born New York: 9 April 1928
died Cambridge, Massachusetts: 26 July 2025
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