RIP Tom Lehrer

[graycardinal]

Reading online this morning, I find news of Tom Lehrer's passing. This is not perhaps unexpected in itself; he had led a long and fruitful life, but it's definitely a moment for reflection, as Lehrer was possibly the cleverest and most literate satirist of our time, not to mention the funniest.

More than usually, though, one of my favorite Diane Duane quotes applies: "What's loved, survives." We still have the music (and that's a very literal "we"; per his Web site, Lehrer a couple of years ago released his entire oeuvre into the public domain.

And in the wake of the news, it turns out he also left behind a (formerly) top secret mathematical joke that took more than half a century to fully detonate. (sanguinity, you should appreciate this....)

Comments

[sanguinity]

I do indeed!

I also appreciate the bit in his Desert Island Disks episode, when asked if he could escape the island (a standard in the question in the format), and the hosts pre-emptively answered for him that of course he could, he would know all the fiddly navigation stuff, he's a mathematician...

He said, "No, no, no, you're thinking of engineers."

Because of course he was the poet kind of mathematician, not the engineer kind of mathematician! (A distinction you may or may not remember TNG!Moriarty making in my "Verity and Verisimilitude".)

His memory for a blessing! It was an honor to share this timeline with him.

[mundungus42]

I suspect you are also someone who sprang to friends' minds when the news broke, and I found out (appropriately enough) when I was singing for a funeral and was forced to NOT think of I Hold Your Hand in Mine during the service.

Thank you for reminding me that he released all of his music. What a mensch. And thank you for sharing the Lehrer-pranks-the-NSA story! (I did exclaim "Bozhe moi!" at the appropriate time.)

One of the things that brought Mr. 42 and me together was a shared love of musical comedy--one of us dropped a Smothers Brothers reference and the other picked it right up. So it was no surprise that we also shared a love of Tom Lehrer and Weird Al. I think it was my freshman year (the year we met) that I sang "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" for a voice jury. We do own the full Remains of Tom Lehrer box set of CDs (which came out 25 years ago, I'll note) as well as a book of sheet music of his songs, so I suspect we'll be revisiting some of our old favorites in the coming weeks.

And now, a remembrance from a rather brilliant satirist and composer of my acquaintance:

Tom Lehrer famously said decades ago that he saw no point in continuing to do political satire after Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I won't give up on satire now, given how much we currently need it, even though for at least 25 years it's undeniably had some trouble keeping up with reality. But I gotta admire a man who does absolutely everything, even dying, with pitch-perfectly ironic timing.
Everybody say his own Kyrie Eleison...
"I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up."
— RIP Tom Lehrer