2025-07-27, 2038h, Remembering tom lehrer

Post to @emsenn@kolektiva.social, 2025-07-27 2038h, Remembering Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer has passed away. He was one of my favorite satirists, in large part because he is who helped teach me (a bit too late for my own and others' good) that satire is, well... inappropriate. And in fact, a lot of political comedy is.

I'm seeing a lot of reflections on Lehrer as a brilliant satirist, and it feels like a disservice to his brilliance to not highlight that he stopped doing satire because, "political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize."

On another occasion, during a performance for I believe Danish audiences (or perhaps Dutch), Lehrer was quoted as saying, “I don’t think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, ‘We need satire of them, not of us.’ I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.”

I think about that a lot, when I think about how to approach my own writing (I used to write role-playing materials that were political satire; now I don't) and when I read some posts here in the Fediverse... and when I write my own posts, and feel an urge to redraft, to work in a punchline or a joke... and remind myself that to do so is to ignore the wisdom of the joke-tellers who helped bring the craft forward to my time.

Anyway. Go find your favorite Tom Lehrer song (even if you haven't ever heard of him before), and enjoy it while reflecting on what role comedy actually has to politics.

A detail about Lehrer I left out is that all of his material is public domain! When he learned he could do so, a few years back, he released the lyrics and original melodies into the public source.

I think that was really cool, because part of Lehrer's lasting popularity was for his song The Elements, which recites all the elements (known at the time), to the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General," from Gilbert and Sullivan's musical The Pirates of Penzance.

Notably, The Pirates of Penzance was the first major opera released in the United States, at a time when there was not any sort of copyright protection. This led the opera's material to become reproduced by theatres all over, and sparked a wide variety of parodies and, I can speculate, an appreciation for public domain art in Tom Lehrer, who, as I said, used that and other public domain melodies to lampoon the world he was writing in.

Also, I didn't realize until recently, but Tom Lehrer's involvement with the NSA has been made, at least partially, public knowledge!

The cool detail here is that in one of the papers he wrote for the NSA, he cited a fake paper that existed only in the context of a song he wrote making fun of a real mathematician for his plagiarism!

And I just love that this dude was writing easter eggs to his own spoof of reality that he had no reason to believe anyone but him would ever know about. That's commitment to the bit.