Biography for
Tom Lehrer More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

Trivia

His first public performance was in 1952 at a Boston nightclub called Alpini's Rendezvous in Kenmore Square, near Boston University.

Was influenced as a boy by the witty, rapid-fire singing style of Danny Kaye. This influence is most noticeable in Lehrer's songs "The Elements" and "Lobachevsky".

Parents divorced when he was 14.

He entered Harvard at age 15, having skipped several grades. Everyone applying for admission to Harvard was required to include an example of their written work. Lehrer submitted a long verse, in the style of William S. Gilbert & Arthur Sullivan, which concluded: "I will leave movie thrillers/And watch caterpillars/Get born and pupated and larva'd/And I'll work like a slave/And always behave/And maybe I'll get into Harva'd." The poem in its entirety appeared in "Scholastic Magazine" in 1943. It was Lehrer's first published work.

Hits include "The Masochism Tango" and "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park".

His three albums for Reprise/Warner Bros. records, "Songs by Tom Lehrer" (repackaged in 1990 as "Revisited"), "An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer", and "That Was the Year That Was" have remained in print continually and have continued to sell since they were released in the late 1950s and mid-1960s. It is Lehrer's quiet boast that these albums have actually sold better over the years since, than they did at the time of release.

Contributed songs to the now classic TV show "That Was the Week That Was" (1964) (NBC: 1963 - 1965), where he also served as an occasional performer. These songs made up the contents of his album "That Was the Year That Was" (Reprise: 1965). He also wrote ten songs and served as an occasional performer for the PBS children's show "The Electric Company" (1971) in the early 1970s.

His songs served as the basis for the hit off-Broadway review "Tomfoolery" in 1981.

Wrote and recorded several anti-war songs, including "Send the Marines", "So Long, Mom, I'm off to Drop the Bomb" and "We'll All Go Together When We Go."

Three songs he wrote for the educational television show "The Electric Company" (1971) were made into animated shorts: "Silent E" "S-N (Snore, Sniff, and Sneeze)," and "L-Y," with orchestrations by Joe Raposo.

Has been been erroneously reported as being dead so many times that he keeps a scrapbook of articles mentioning him as "the late Tom Lehrer".

Wrote ten songs for "The Electric Company" (1971) after a call from producer Naomi Foner because he was a Harvard classmate and good friend of the late Joe Raposo, the show's musical director for most of the time it was in production and its primary songwriter.

Personal Quotes

It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.

I have always found it interesting... that there are people who regard copyright infringement as a form of flattery.

Irreverence is easy - what's hard is wit.

I've occasionally heard that I was kicked out [of Harvard] for being a Communist, for dealing drugs, for corrupting minors, or for diverse other infractions of local decorum. Unfortunately, none of these rumours are true. The one I've heard more often is that I am dead. That one I encouraged, hoping it would cut down on the junk mail. It didn't.

The nature of forbidden words has certainly changed. For example, when I was in college, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can't say "girl".

[From interview with Barry Hansen, aka Dr. Demento, c. 1990s]: I never had the temperament of a performer. For example, I do not require anonymous affection, such as that manifested by the applause of large groups of strangers. (I love it when they buy the records, however.) Moreover, I always considered myself a writer rather than a performer. I didn't relish the prospect of doing pretty much the same show night after night, any more than a novelist would enjoy reading his book aloud every night. I wanted to do the songs only until I was satisfied with the performance and then record them. I wanted the audience to leave thinking "Weren't those songs funny?", whereas most, if not all, comedians want them to leave thinking "Wasn't he (or she) funny?" As for stopping writing, it used to be that if an idea came to me, I'd write, and if it didn't, I wouldn't -- and, gradually, the second condition prevailed over the first. I didn't regard it as a problem. Occasionally people ask, "If you enjoyed it" (and I did) "why don't you do it again?" I reply, "I enjoyed high school, but I certainly wouldn't want to do that again".

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.

I did rather well myself this past Christmas. The nicest present I received was a gift certificate good in any hospital for a lobotomy. How thoughtful.

[on why he never married]: I have a notoriously short attention span. I can barely concentrate on (the 8-hour stage production) 'Nicholas Nickleby', let alone sustain a relationship.

I know some people feel that marriage as an institution is dying out, but I disagree and the point was driven home to me rather forcefully not long ago by a letter I received which said: "Darling, I love you and I cannot live without you. Marry me, or I will kill myself". Well, I was a little disturbed at that until I took another look at the envelope and saw that it was addressed to 'occupant'.

Well, what I like to do on formal occasions like this is to take some of the various types of songs that we all know and presumably love and, as it were, to kick them when they're down. I find that if you take the various popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything from the ridiculous to the obscene or, as they say in New York, sophisticated.

Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.

I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

Plagiarise / Plagiarise / Let no-one else's work / Evade your eyes

Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

Where Are They Now

(January 2004) Lecturer, University of Californa Santa Cruz