I was just listenting to my old tom Lehrer records all night while drinking. Damn that man is funny. But what do do you consider his best line ever? Mine is:
“What with President Johnson practising ''escalatio(sp?)* on the the Vietnamese, America has begun to feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis.”
40 years later, and he still cracks me up.
[sub]* I have no idea if “escalatio” is a real word or if I spelled it right, but that just makes it more funny, cause I know what he means.[/sub]
Back in the 80s, an acquaintance of mine played for me one of her prized possessions: A tape transfer of a wire spool recording of Tom Lehrer and two other professors putting on some sort of performance for a group of students. None of his regular stuff, all different.
I don’t recall much about it, except that they did a parody of “Fugue for Tinhorns” from Guys and Dolls that espoused the relative merits of their specialty. I recall it ended,
one guy: Chemistry…
Lehrer: Math…
other guy: Physics…
unison: I got the coooooooouurse riiiiiiiiiight heeeeeeeeeere!
I’d be very hard pressed to find one line to be a favorite; they were all so good.
What I can say is that I learned about the 60s through his humor. I had no idea of whom Sheriff Clark and Lena Horn were until I heard “National Brotherhood Week.” But I learned something: it probably had something to do with a white man and a black woman.
“Who’s Next” taught me that Israel had the bomb (and that I learned, as a seven-year-old in the late 80s)–years later I would learn that Israel wouldn’t admit to it.
And I learned “The Elements” verbatim just to show off to my middle-school school chemistry teacher:
TEACHER: Now it's time to learn about the elements.
ME: I know about them.
TEACHER: Oh, you do? Then tell me.
ME: [Reciting "The Elements," in entirety, by Tom Lehrer]
TEACHER: That's very good, **guizot**. Now can you tell me how they react to one another?
ME: Well, I thought that was YOUR job. But I CAN say that hydrogen and oxygen make water; and that nitrogen is the majority of the air.
I’ll have you know that I memorized “The Elements” on VINYL–yes, my parents had turn-tables and vinyl in the 80s. They were from Boston. And they loved Tom Lehrer (as well as the Kingston Trio).
For some reason “I Wanna Go Back To Dixie” is going through my head.
*
Won’tcha come with me to Alabammy,
Back to the arms of my dear ol’ Mammy,
Her cookin’s lousy and her hands are clammy,
But what the hell, it’s home.*
The tune don’t have to be clever,
And it don’t matter if you put a couple extra syllables into a line.
It sounds more ethnic if it ain’t good English
And it don’t even gotta rhyme… (excuse me: rhyne!)
And from “That’s Mathematics”
How much gold can you hold in an elephant’s ear?
When it’s noon on the moon, then what time is it here?
If you could count for a year, would you get to infinity,
Or somewhere in that vicinity?
I’m pretty sure I first heard Tom Lehrer singing “Silent E” on The Electric Company. I’ve been a fan ever since.
My parents were big Lehrer fans, and I knew the words to most of his songs long before I really understood them. I vividly remember reading Oedpius Rex in high school and thinking “Ohhh … now I get it!”
A couple verses from “It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier”:
Now Ed flunked out of second grade, and never finished school.
He doesn’t know a shelter half from an entrenching tool.
But he’s going to be a big success.
He heads his class at OCS.
It makes a fella proud to be a soldier!
Our old mess sergeant’s taste buds had been shot off in the war.
But his savory collations add to our esprit de corps.
To think of all the marvelous ways
They’re using plastics nowadays.
It makes a fella proud to be a soldier!
Our lieutenant is the up-and-coming type.
Played with soldiers as a boy you just can bet.
It is written in the stars
He will get his captain’s bars,
But he hasn’t got enough box tops yet.
Our captain has a handicap to cope with, sad to tell.
He’s from Georgia, and he doesn’t speak the language very well.
He used to be, so rumor has,
The Dean of Men at Alcatraz.
It makes a fella proud to be a soldier!
I’ve loved Tom Lehrer since I first heard “The Masochism Tango” on Dr. Demento, back in the '70s.
I have not one, but three original pressings of his first, self-financed and distributed 10" album. One of them is from England, where he got on the Decca label, which was the big time over there. Back home, he couldn’t get a record label to touch him! He had to start his own.
I haven’t heard Tom Lehrer for probably 30 years, but his stuff sticks in your head amazingly. Just the other day I found myself remembering:
Watch Brinkley and Huntley describing contrapuntally
The cities we have lost.
No need for you to miss a minute
of the agonizing holocaust!
Looking back, I can’t account for how this album might have fallen into my hands as a ten-year-old. I can only guess that my parents had it.
When you think of it, Tom Lehrer has to be one of the most unusual successes the recording industry has ever produced.
Lehrer has a great line, by the way, quoted in the Wikipedia article: “I’m not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.”