Tom Lehrer (1928-2025) has left the building

Today I received emails with news of the death of satirist Tom Lehrer as if he was a relative. And in a way he was. He was the constant thread in my life from the age of eight when my sister and I stretched up to the top shelf in our parents’ living room to take down his LP of the 1950s and play such child-friendly numbers as ‘The Old Dope Peddler’ ‘Masochism Tango’, and ‘The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz’. If imitation is a fine way of showing appreciation, I did so. I remember commandeering a microphone in a café in Switzerland to sing 'Masochism Tango' with my children to the bemusement of the guests, one of whom turned out to be the drummer from ‘The Animals’. At the eccentric metals trading office I used to work for, I brought my guitar to work and turned the words of Lobachevsky, itself a parody, into a parody of a metal merchant seeking to bring elements out of the former Soviet Union. ‘I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk, whose friend in Omsk, has friend in Tomsk with friend in Akmolinsk’ etc… It took a while to learn but I managed it. The Old Dope Peddler lent itself to metals conversion with the verse, ‘He gives the kids free samples because he knows full well, that today’s young innocent faces will be tomorrow’s clientele’.  [I am writing all these verses from memory, so please feel free to look them up and check]. And then of course, if anyone in the metals trade knew just one of his songs it was 'The Elements' used by one company in Sheffield on repeat for its 'call-waiting'. At my accession to the noble title of Chairman of the MMTA in 2001 I determined I would learn the whole of it. After my three years term I still hadn't fully got it when I took the song to Strasbourg where my job was to represent our trade in the face of EU Legislation now known as the 'EU Chemical Directive'. I ended the evening singing it to Nigel Farage and the entire UKIP crew who had politely come out in support and invited our group to their 'Gadfly' Dinner (so called because David Cameron had called their poltical party 'a group of gadflies'.)

Not so long ago, I gave a talk entitled ‘Cold War Worriers’ in which I described the way in which artists of every hue worried in the 1950s about our likely destruction via nuclear war, so I used the words from his satirical song about Werner Von Braun. ‘When the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department says Werner Von Braun’. Not being a pianist, I accompanied myself on the Ukulele.

Tom Lehrer allegedly said upon reaching the 1960s that 'the things that made him laugh, now made him cry'. God only knows what he made of today’s world. What little I know about his post-satirical life, is that he embedded himself in the mathematics that he loved and satirised in Lobachevsky, a very real mathematician who was accused of plagiarizing his theorems.

If he discovered an answer to human life by the end of his own, perhaps he found out that it was indeed 42. May his satire live on.