I have no idea where or when I made the acquaintance of Tom Lehrer, who has gone west on us at the ripe old age of 97.
But I was immediately enthralled. What a mind!
I couldn’t do math at gunpoint. What few resources I possessed were directed at trying (and often failing) to make people laugh.
But Tom Lehrer could do both, and seemingly with ease. Numbers and words alike danced to his merrily sardonic tunes.
In the end, he chose academia over comedy. I expect his GPA was a wee bit more impressive than mine. At the age of 18 he received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard; at that age I was a freshman on drugs and academic probation at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo.
As Lehrer’s obit in The New York Times recounts:
His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.
I never caught his mathematical act at those venues. But I saw him perform on TV a time or two, and heard him now and then on FM radio, both freeform and public. My faves were “Wernher von Braun,” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Vatican Rag,” and “A Song for World War III,” which I suspect may have inspired Randy Newman’s “Political Science.”
And five years before he left us on Saturday, he remembered us in his will. Well, on his website, anyway, where he announced that:
[A]ll the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else.
In other words, he relinquished the rights to all his songs, except for the melodies of a few that used his words but someone else’s music.
The curtain may have rung down, but his satirical legacy survives. So long, Tom, you never dropped a bomb.
Mad Blog Media 
He was pure genius. In a post in a YouTube clip, a poster suggested that the next chemical element to be discovered be named Lehrerium. I’m completely onboard with this.
O, hell yeah.
Sometimes the Internet is almost worth keeping around. Several schools in our district have been using his periodic table song, not so much because they really want kids to memorize all of the elements, but just to show that memory feats like that are possible, and to show this synergy of the sciences and the liberal arts. Even though he’s been out of the spotlight for many, many years, another generation is becoming familiar with his work.
I would wager we have at least fifty 8th graders at our middle school each year who memorize that song.
Kids who are normally listening to Taylor Swift or Hank Styles, but you’ll catch them tapping their feet and bobbing their head while a classmate rattles off all of the elements.
Sheldon Cooper sang the song on “Big Bang Theory,” too. (I only know this because the show was a fave of Herself the Elder.)
There’s a loss. Great guy.
This one just popped into my head while I was prepping dinner:
Vatican Rag
Who was the guy that used to sit at a piano and do political satire songs on PBS back in the day? This isn’t the same guy is it?
Your guy might have been Mark Russell, Carl. There have been more than a few piano-playing comics, Steve Allen among them, but I think Russell is the best-known PBS dude.
– So the pigeons finally got him..? He was the master when it can to political satire. I can remember watching That Was The Week That Was, the US version, on a black and white TV in Florida in the 60’s. Some of the material was attributed to Tom Lehrer. Tom Lehrer and his full Copenhagen Performance is on YouTube. You can watch the full 50 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHPmRJIoc2k
Good stuff here today. Sorry to see the auld boy leave the planet but if he hadn’t khacked, and you all hadn’t posted about him….I would have remained forever ignorant of his talent and wit. Thanks all. BTW-I’ve played keyboards in my younger days and dashing out the tune while not looking at the keyboard while singing somewhat complex lyrics is NO easy thing.