Tom Lehrer has died.
If you don't know his work, get thy ass to YouTube and catch both his songs and his work for the kiddie show The Electric Company. Seventy years since he started doing his songs and about sixty since he stopped performing his comedic songs, his work is still timely.
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Slava Ukraini!
Monday, July 28, 2025
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in Old London Town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
4 comments:
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中國詞不評論，冒抹除的風險。僅英語。
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I grew up listening to his songs as a small child. Still remember some of the lyrics; probably why I'm twisted a little off-center.
ReplyDeleteAnother titan of conscience and satire gone. I purchased his entire oeuvre 25 years ago, from Amazon...the Remains of Tom Lehrer.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B00004SWBHI
It's available used on Ebay upwards of $20.
But he's everywhere on Youtube...
I was introduced to Tom Lehrer as a high-school Freshman taking a Senior-level Cultural Anthropology class in 1970, many thanks to amazing educator Alan Eggleston for that exposure. In a related note, that same class was where another student slipped me my very first NATIONAL LAMPOON magazine to inhale. I've not been the same ever since, to my everlasting benefit. R.I.P. Tom!
ReplyDeleteSome choice quotes from Mr. Lehrer:
ReplyDelete“Bad weather always looks worse through a window.”
“I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!”
“I used to pick up the newspaper and laugh....But now I pick up the paper and I have to wait till breakfast is over because it’s just going to ruin it.”
“I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.”
“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.”
“It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.”
“Life is like a sewer... what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”
“Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.”
— Thomas Andrew Lehrer