I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living

[sovay]

Tom Lehrer had entered my household's dialect before I was born. That's not my department. I am never forget the day. Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air. Only be sure always to call it please research. More, more, I'm still not satisfied. Lucky Pierre! Who's next? Songs not on rotation in my parents' record collection could be encountered lyrically and traumatically in Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer with Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle (1981). One could in fact call him one of my idols since childbirth. With just a handful of music, he touched the hearts of millions, and in the spirit of his own liner notes, I hope he died mad about it.

Comments

[mrissa]

We listened to several at my mother's this evening. I remember doing jazz hands to "genuflect genuflect genuflect" with my father when I was in the 6-8yo range. I do not have a lot of celebrity crushes generally speaking but I have such a crush on the moment in "Werner von Braun" where the urbane smile slips for half a second and you can see how incandescently furious he is.

[selkie]

He was so funny and so shatteringly prescient.

[asakiyume]

Oh no! I've been out of earshot of news for the past two days... I hadn't heard.

He was a good one. A very good one.

[a_reasonable_man]

My experience, too. I posted my own tribute on Facebook.

[greenwoodside]

Not Tom Lehrer! The last I heard about him was a few years ago, when he put his works in the public domain.

The world needs more Tom Lehrers, but as is the way of these things, we only ever get one.

[genarti]

Yeah. 97 is a heck of a good run, but it still feels impossible; he was such a very good egg, and so many of his songs are perfect quotable gems.

[phi]

I was delighted to read about this prank he pulled at the NSA that wasn't discovered for _sixty years_. Always check the references!

https://bsky.app/profile/opalescentopal.bsky.social/post/3luxxx27nos23

[a_reasonable_man]

The tributes I've been seeing online show that even now, generations after he stopped writing and performing, a great many people, even young ones, know most of his songs by heart. You could mount a spontaneous Tom Lehrer revue tomorrow, and the performers would show up off book, and the audience would gleefully sing along.

[larryhammer]

He was part of my family's idiolect as well. My mother went to Harvard (technically Radcliff, because woman) in the late '50s and raised me listening to and playing his songs. My favorite to play was "The Masochism Tango," because tango, but to listen to it was ... no, I can't, too many to list out.

I have not done a good job of introducing Eaglet to him. Far too many songs, they have no context for.

Has anyone heard whether his claim to have invented the jello shot has stood up to scrutiny?

[thisbluespirit]

*yet more hugs*