For those of you that don’t know, here’s Tom Lehrer:
http://www.youtube.com/channel/HCpGEdvjfRSmg
This is a terrible hijack of a serious OP, and my intent wasn’t the hijack. But he’s so good. Any dopers who don’t know Tom Lehrer are, as said to Officer Krupke, “depraved onnacount we’re deprived.”
Mods. do what you will, Okay?
Tom Lehrer did not retire from singing and writing satirical songs because of Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Prize. He had quit doing that several years before Kissinger won the prize. His Wikipedia entry quotes him about that. He did jokingly say that the award made satire obsolete, but he denies that it had anything to do with him quitting singing and writing:
I don’t know what you mean by saying that he is “now remember[ed] as the inventor of the Jello shot, the Electric Company song “Silent E” and for a boring career as a professor of mathematics.” I doubt that there’s anyone who, if asked who Tom Lehrer was, would say that they didn’t know that he wrote satire, but they know about the jello shot, the Electric Company song, and his math teaching. It’s not really true that he invented the jello shot in any case:
Incidentally, he probably wasn’t a professor of mathematics at all. He taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1972 to 2001. His title was probably something like adjunct lecturer, since he wasn’t full-time and didn’t have a Ph.D. The courses he taught were one that was math for non-mathematicians and one that was about American musical theater. It also appears that his students didn’t find him to be boring at all.