How Tom Lehrer Escaped the Transience of Satire

Satire, George S. Kaufman famously mentioned, is what closes on Saturday evening. That means, in fact, that it has a restricted run due to its intrinsically circumscribed curiosity. To this, one may add an extra precept: even when a bit of satire makes it to the Wednesday matinée, it’ll achieve this by being so exactly on course, and so particular in its targets, that it shouldn’t have any likelihood of sustaining itself after no matter it was firing at is forgotten. A slender bull’s-eye, absolutely, precludes a variety.But, in reality, satire—a minimum of satire of nice high quality—lives simply so long as every other sort of artwork. It retains its objects alive by lampooning them and, wrapping itself across the topic, fossil-like, replaces the unique substance with its personal materials. Of no satirist was this more true than the good American songwriter Tom Lehrer, who died on Saturday, and whose firefly-brief targets are nonetheless alight largely by the mockery he aimed toward them. By the oddest of probabilities, this author was taking part in a Tom Lehrer album to some youngish associates over the weekend, unaware that he was dying, or, to be completely trustworthy, that he was nonetheless alive, they usually responded instantly even when the supplies had been alien.The album I performed, recorded reside in 1965, is Lehrer’s finest, and even its title, “That Was the Yr That Was,” illustrates the preservative properties of satire; it riffs on the title of a short-lived American TV present, “That Was the Week That Was,” tailored from an English present that had been an enormous hit. The topics of “T.W.T.Y.T.W.” are certainly largely unfamiliar now: there’s a tune mocking George Murphy, a minor star of Hollywood musicals who had grow to be a senator that yr, previous Ronald Reagan in being an actor turned California politician. Certainly, the stirrings of Reagan’s political ambition—he had but to face for workplace however had been a vocal Barry Goldwater supporter the yr earlier than—are talked about within the tune’s preliminary patter, to incredulous laughter from the viewers. (The joke now will get a unique snigger.) Then there’s one on the struggles of the liberal hero Hubert Humphrey as Lyndon Johnson’s Vice-President—and who remembers Humphrey now or, even when they do, is aware of that he was as soon as a liberal hero? One other, the “MLF Lullaby,” data a fleeting controversy a couple of NATO proposal for a “multilateral pressure” of internationally crewed nuclear warships and submarines. The proposal went nowhere however has been rescued from oblivion by Lehrer’s remark that it will contain West Germany’s accessing nuclear weapons:As soon as all of the Germans had been warlike and meanBut that couldn’t occur once more.We taught them a lesson in 1918And they’ve hardly bothered us since then.You don’t must know something concerning the M.L.F. (and likely some folks within the unique viewers didn’t) to get the joke. In the identical manner, in case you don’t know who Wernher von Braun—the German rocket scientist who labored for the Nazis after which for us—was, you’ll know all it’s worthwhile to from Lehrer’s ballad to him:Vunce ze rockets are up,Who cares vere zey come down?Zat’s not my division,Says Wernher von Braun.”This self-contained high quality—the songs deliciously fixing their topics in formaldehyde—is a part of what retains Lehrer’s work alive. In addition to, a few of his targets really are enduring—as within the anthem to the vacuity of Nationwide Brotherhood Week, which resonates all of the extra now, after we are solely extra deeply caught in empty pieties. Equally, when he introduces his “struggle tune” for World Battle Three, he explains that if there are to be any songs from that battle “we’d higher begin writing them now.”Lehrer’s items included a unprecedented and simply missed musicality, the key sauce of his satire. One easy cause his songs endure is that, for all that they’re written for his or her phrases, it’s arduous to cease buzzing their tunes. His brilliance as a pianist stored him from changing into repetitive, notably as a result of he had such a exceptional expertise for musical pastiche, flitting with ease from Broadway to marches, lieder, calypso, Christmas songs, folks ballads, flamenco, Viennese waltzes, Mozart, fashionable jazz, ragtime, and Gilbert and Sullivan. In the meantime, the truth that he as soon as tailored an precise Gilbert and Sullivan quantity for a tune made up totally of the names of the weather of the periodic desk factors to his different astonishing reward— he was not only a humorous lyricist however an professional one, as versatile in his prosody and as virtuosic to find surprising rhymes as Stephen Sondheim, a onetime summer-camp companion of his:Little Johnny Jones, he was a U.S. pilot,and no shrinking violetWas he.He was mighty proud when World Battle Three was declaredHe wasn’t scared,Nosiree!And that is what he mentioned onHis technique to ArmageddonOr in “The Vatican Rag”: “Do no matter steps you need if / You’ve gotten cleared them with the pontiff.” Patterns of internal rhyme as fantastically labored out and narratively proper as something in “Follies” abound, as within the scrumptious “Smut,” which was prompted by the enjoyable of anti-obscenity legal guidelines by the Warren Courtroom:Smut!Ah, the adventures of a slut!A unclean novel I can’t shutIf it’s uncutAnd unsub-tle. . . .Who wants a pastime, like tennis or philately?I’ve received a pastime—re-reading “Woman Chatterley”His masterpiece was likely his ballad tribute to Alma Mahler Werfel, the legendary Viennese socialite, muse, and someday composer who, as Lehrer places when introducing the tune, “had in her lifetime managed to amass as lovers virtually all the high inventive males in Central Europe.” Focussing his tune on her three husbands—the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the creator Franz Werfel—Lehrer captured each flip in completely resourceful rhyme:Whereas married to Gus she met GropiusAnd quickly she was swinging with WalterGus died and her tear drops had been copiousShe cried all the way in which to the altar.However he would work late on the BauhausAnd solely got here residence at times.She mentioned, “What am I working? A chow home?It’s time to alter companions once more.”There have been critical makes an attempt to put in writing an Alma musical, a good suggestion on the floor, however they’ve foundered on the truth that no two-act present can presumably be nearly as good as Lehrer’s three-minute tune.Lehrer largely stopped performing and recording within the nineteen-seventies and retreated, or maybe superior, into life as a full-time professor of math within the College of California system, though he was the topic of a number of revues and revivals afterwards. (One was known as “Tom Lehrer Is Educating Math and Doesn’t Wish to Discuss to You,” in honor of the response despatched by Lehrer to the producers.) Amongst his followers, his strolling away from all of it is a part of his legend. Why did he cease? He favored to assert that present occasions had overtaken his artwork—“Political satire grew to become out of date when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” he as soon as mentioned and sometimes repeated —and likely he had private causes, too. A good friend who noticed him only a few weeks in the past at his final residence, in Cambridge—having studied and taught at Harvard, he had the Crimsonite’s residual affection for the place—remembers that, nonetheless in terrific mental form, he appeared totally unmarked by any neediness with regard to up to date fame. Principally, he spoke, fondly, of Broadway musicals sought out and seen. Rightly prizing the work of Frank Loesser, he notably relished a revival of “ How To Succeed In Enterprise With out Even Attempting” that starred Daniel Radcliffe—and had been happy to find that Radcliffe was a Lehrer fan who had used some extended stage time throughout “Equus,” when he needed to cling to the ground within the fetal place, to memorize “The Parts.” Lehrer even had a couple of affectionately arduous phrases about his campmate Sondheim’s rhyming, citing a couple of as mere “printers’ rhymes.”Think about being nonetheless extra fanatic about rhyme than its legendary grasp! Perhaps this trait had one thing to do with a mathematician’s distaste for something even barely messy or misshapen. And so maybe, ultimately, there’s no thriller to the thriller. A mathematician’s thoughts was content material with a couple of perfectly-solved equations. Though Individuals take with no consideration that fame, as soon as tasted, is addictive, it’s doable merely to not wish to do it anymore. Some fortunate folks simply don’t want the fixed show-biz buzz of approval. Present biz has its indignities, too—and what life is extra undignified than that of the satiric coffeehouse-and-cabaret circuit?—and a few folks, having tasted glory a few times, discover that they will get on nice with out it. Silence is as idiosyncratic as expertise, and we are able to be pleased about what we’ve received.