Birthday: Tom Lehrer, always eager to please: "On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away."

Thomas Andrew Lehrer (1928- )

Songwriter

Tom Lehrer is 87 years old today. He was truly- “bigly”, The Donald would say- famous for a dozen years. In 1972 Tom Lehrer decided he didn’t want to be famous any more, so he stopped.

He got off the fame train and just stopped the whole business. He has given only a handful of interviews, mostly accidentally, in forty years, and his published output consists of two papers on mathematics and thirty-seven songs.

The fame train moved on without him.

He was a child prodigy in math and trained for a while in classical piano. He didn't like classical piano, so he switched to popular song styles. He entered Harvard at fifteen and started writing comic songs after the manner of Gilbert & Sullivan (one, “The Elements,” set the periodic table to the tune of “I Am The Very Model of A Modern Major General,” from The Pirates of Penzance. His first published song, 1945's “Fight Fiercely, Harvard!” mocked the school’s incongruous devotion to its mediocre sports teams).

Lehrer got his MA in 1947, and taught at MIT, Wellesley, and Harvard. He spent fifteen years on his Ph.D dissertation before decided it wasn’t a long-term career vehicle.

In 1953, he booked some studio time and recorded a disc called Songs of Tom Lehrer. He ordered 400 copies and some of the local shops carried it as  favor. They sold for $3.50 each. People bought them and took them home, all over the country, and played them at parties, where his sardonic rhymes, reedy- almost Groucho-like voice and vaguely salacious subject matter appealed to the hipsters of the day.

Before long, orders started coming in. Lehrer formed a music company, got some more records made,and hired some students to do the shipping. Around Boston he started getting invitations to perform at parties. When there got to be too many, he’d raise the price, which tamped down the demand, only for a bit.

Lehrer later recalled, "Lacking exposure in the media, my songs spread slowly. Like herpes, rather than ebola."

But Lehrer’s ebola virus moment came in 1957, when the University of London awarded Princess Margaret an honorary degree for no particular reason. The university's public orator Professor J.R. Sutherland stated, "that the Princess is a connoisseur of music and a performer of skill and distinction, her taste being catholic, ranging from Mozart to the calypso and from opera to the songs of Miss Beatrice Lillie and Tom Lehrer.“

Because it was the Queen’s sister, the comment caused a rush to find out who that Lehrer was. The BBC started playing his records (by now he’d added “More of Tom Lehrer” and “A Wasted Evening With Tom Lehrer”).  By 1960, he sold 370,000 copies in the UK.

American radio shunned him. He didn’t particularly care, commenting years later, "I know it's very bad form to quote one's own reviews, but there is something the New York Times said about me [in 1958], that I have always treasured: 'Mr. Lehrer's muse [is] not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.")

Time magazine, whose editors loved few things better than denouncing people 99.9% of Americans would never read see or hear, denounced Lehrer, along with comics Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, as avatars of a new, “sick humor” fad that was completely unwholesome.

When a BBC topical comedy show, That Was The Week That Was, came to America in 1964-65, Lehrer was hired as its songwriter. His new songs were edgier and more political, and so, frequently censored by the network. In his arch manner, he wrote lyrics about abortion; some 25 years ahead of the news, gay Boy Scouts (“If you’re out behind the woodshed doing what you’d like to do, just be sure that your companion is a Boy Scout too”); the nuclear arms race (“Don't say that he's hypocritical/Say rather that he's apolitical/"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down/That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun”); and reforms in the Catholic Church:

First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want, if
You have cleared them with the pontiff.
Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison,
Doin' the vatican rag.

Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional,
There, the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.
If it is, try playin' it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate!

So get down upon your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in rome do like a roman,
Ave maria,
Gee it's good to see ya,
Gettin' ecstatic an'
Sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the vatican rag!

And there was no forgetting another of his holiday songs: 

I'm spending Hanukkah/ in Santa Monica/Wearing sandals/Lighting candles by the sea-I spent Shavuos/ in East St. Louis/A charming spot/But clearly not the spot for me...

No one saw him; a woman sang them. In a sequel, That Was The Year That Was, Lehrer got to appear on screen and perform his own work. He did a famously successful tour of Scandinavia in 1967, where he declared he was America’s  revenge for Victor Borge.

He taught some, and toured some more. In the early 1970s, he wrote some songs for the PBS kids’ show, The Electric Company. His last round of public performances was in 1972- a series of fundraisers for the Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern.

The he quit. He was tired of the travel, and the interviews, and singing the same songs over and over. “Things I once thought were funny are scary now,” he told People magazine in 1982. “I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.” Another time he commented, “Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize”.

He took a teaching post at UC Santa Cruz, conducting undergraduate courses like “Mathematics in the Liberal Arts,” which became known as “Math for Tenors.” When not teaching, he directed plays for the university theater department.

His work, however hard he tried to drop out of sight, didn’t. In 1980 a musical review, Tomfoolery, was a hit on Broadway and in London. A 2000 boxed set of his recording boosted his long-steady royalties to new heights.

Lehrer retired from teaching in 2001. Hs work continued to inspire others from Mark Russell to rappers. The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel was launched by a Scandinavian fan who pressed him, unavailingly, to decide what its destiny should be:

TL: Well, you see, I’m fine with that channel.

EM: You’re very kind. But my question is: Who in your family will take care of your copyright and your songs in the distant future?

TL: I don’t have a family.

EM: OK, but what do you think will happen to the channel and your songs? And if you have someone who will act on your behalf, could you give them my name in case they’d want the channel taken down?

TL: Yes, but there’s no need to remove that channel.

EM: I was just wondering what will happen in the future, because you’re certainly going to continue to sell records.

TL: Well, I don’t need to make money after I’m dead. These things will be taken care of.

EM: I feel like I gave away some of your songs to public domain without even asking you, and that wasn’t very nice of me.

TL: But I’m fine with that, you know.

EM: Will you establish any kind of foundation or charity or something like that?

TL: No, I won’t. They’re mostly rip-offs.

“I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity”, Tom Lehrer said. By all accounts, he succeeded grandly, and has had a long and happy life, entirely on his terms.