Who can fill the role of Tom Lehrer today?

By A.V.

IT FEELS quaint now: a man with tidy hair and an elegant suit sits at a piano, his thick glasses sticking to his nose. He makes a few quips, and the audience titters politely. Then the man begins to sing. Flowers in his voice, he tells the story of a local drug dealer.

“He gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today’s young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow’s clientele.”

The audience guffaws. “The Old Dope Peddler” was one of Tom Lehrer’s most controversial songs, and Mr Lehrer was once one of the most cutting satirists in America. His sharp wit still resonates today.

Mr Lehrer did not mean to be a musician. He was a mathematician by training, but discovered a talent for parody while an undergraduate at Harvard. His first songs were just for friends, but Mr Lehrer was soon performing for larger crowds. By 1964, his songs appeared on American television, while Mr Lehrer himself played concerts as far afield as Denmark. His famous admirers included Issac Asimov, a science-fiction writer, and a taste for the nerdy was always a hallmark: one popular song was a jauntily rhyming recitation of all of the chemical elements.

He could have done well with highbrow novelty songs alone. But rather than shuffling around the controversies of the day, in the style of Bob Hope, Mr Lehrer leapt right in. The results shocked and amused Americans, while the politics of the time gave him plenty of material. Mocking Lyndon Johnson’s reluctance to enforce anti-racist legislation, he sings that Marines get sent “to the shores of Tripoli” but not to “Mississippoli”. Elsewhere, Mr Lehrer tweaked fussy censors. “Smut!” he smiled, leering at the crowd. “Give me smut and nothing but!”

Mr Lehrer teased the self-righteous pieties of liberals, too. In “The Folk Song Army” he told his audience that he hated “poverty, war and injustice, unlike the rest of you squares!” Introducing another number, the comedian says he’d “like to turn to the folk song, which has become in recent years the particularly fashionable form of idiocy among the self-styled intellectual”. Elsewhere, Mr Lehrer turned his wit against the racist insincerity of some do-gooders: “It’s fun to eulogise the people you despise, as long as you don’t let them in your school.”

Aiming his guns haphazardly ultimately turned Mr Lehrer away from satire. As the Vietnam war ripped America apart, his sweeping rudeness felt glib. “In the late 60s and early 70s audiences wanted not to be amused but to be exhorted, not to laugh but to march,” he remembered later. Divisive social issues, like abortion, hardly helped. “It’s impossible to write a funny song when you can see both sides.” Mr Lehrer’s last gig was in 1972. He then slipped back into work as a maths professor, teaching his last class in 2001.

Despite his own misgivings—he is now 89—Mr Lehrer still has plenty of fans, with his songs covered in genres from (ironically) ukulele folk to death metal. The singer takes all this lightly. When 2 Chainz, a rapper, asked to sample “The Old Dope Peddler” in one of his tracks, Mr Lehrer was keen to help. “I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this,” he supposedly answered. “Please give my regards to Mr Chainz, or may I call him 2?”

That even 2 Chainz appreciates Mr Lehrer is a mark of how relevant many of his tracks still are. When he warns about pollution—“the halibuts and the sturgeons are being wiped out by detergents”—Mr Lehrer could have been singing yesterday. With overt racism surging again, his assault on the hypocrisies of the Old South also seems fitting: “I want to talk to southern gentlemen, and put that white sheet on again.” Songs about less nasty topics feel just as modern. Though it was composed for the Second Vatican Council, “Vatican Rag” fits gracefully into a debate about liberalism in the current papacy. Turning the liturgy into a ragtime piece, Mr Lehrer tells Catholics they can “do whatever steps you want if you have cleared them with the Pontiff”.

Increased global tension has highlighted another of Mr Lehrer’s favourite themes: nuclear weapons. These songs show him at his most deliciously grim. “So long mom, I’m off to drop the bomb!” begins one. “I’ll look for you when the war is over, an hour and a half from now!” When nuclear catastrophe comes, he cheers elsewhere, “we will all go together when we go, what a comforting fact that is to know!”

Today, America is as divided as it has been since Mr Lehrer’s heyday. Then as now, comics are expected to take a stance on divisive issues. Those who don’t can suffer. Jimmy Fallon, a talk-show host who was famously soft on Donald Trump (and whose show continues to pursue broad appeal rather than political criticism), has seen his ratings slide. Perhaps Mr Fallon, who enjoys singing on his show, should take Mr Lehrer’s approach instead. As his wonderful songs attest, universal bitterness set to a jaunty tune is a good way to get audiences singing along.