Who is tom lehrer

He has one foot outside the mainstream. But so far in its history, satire has done little else successfully. So SNL and the Daily Show and all the rest have a decision to make: are there any sacred cows left worth targeting?

If not, then satire must reinvent itself. Aurash Z. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays. This might be clear from the fact that he earned a Bachelor's in mathematics from Harvard by the age of 18, and a Master's degree by age However, it is even more obvious from his songs. To listen to them is to experience genius in an accessible, yet inimitable way. Plus he invented Jello shots. At the time of the shows, Lehrer was a graduate student in mathematics at Harvard. He spent several years in graduate school in two stints split up by time in the army, amongst other things , but he never did complete his dissertation.

Santa Cruz. Lehrer has never shied away from controversy, or worried in the least about being politically incorrect. Finally, in he recorded a follow-up, More of Tom Lehrer , featuring "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" and "The Masochism Tango"; the same collection of songs were also recorded during a live performance at Harvard, and issued simultaneously as An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer.

A tour of Europe followed, resulting in another concert collection, Tom Lehrer Revisited , which constituted live renditions of the tracks from the debut LP. However, controversial reactions to his "sick" comedy during a series of Australian performances prompted Lehrer to retire, and he returned full-time to his first love, teaching. After the show's demise a year later, Lehrer recorded the material written for the program on an LP also titled That Was the Week That Was ; the album, which featured his controversial "Vatican Rag," was the first in his contract with the Reprise label, which also agreed to reissue his earlier, self-released records.

After re-recording Songs by Tom Lehrer to improve on the original master's poor fidelity, he again retired from show business to return to academia; however, his songs were played regularly on the Dr. Demento radio show beginning in the '70s, and he became the program's second most requested artist of all time behind Weird Al Yankovic. Lehrer 's subsequent returns to show business were brief -- in he wrote a dozen tunes for the children's program The Electric Company, updated older material for a musical stage show dubbed Tomfoolery produced by Cameron Mackintosh of Cats fame , and some years later, agreed to write occasionally for Garrison Keillor.

Lehrer continued to teach mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at age 72 witnessed Rhino Records' reissue of his complete recorded works in the form of a three-CD box set titled The Remains of Tom Lehrer. He was a PhD student there at the time. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Fans might, however, have been surprised to learn that he had crunched numbers for the National Security Agency as an army draftee in the mids.

Bellos Nature , 34—35; He was drawn to songwriting in his teens; after failing to respond to classical-music training, he switched to the study of popular music. In the early s, Lehrer put on a satirical show in the physics department, The Physical Revue a pun on the name of the US journal then named Physical Review. It was a training ground for later triumphs. Credit: Lehrer Records. He began recording in