Tom Lehrer, musical satirist who taught math at UC Santa Cruz, dies

Editor’s note: Tom Lehrer, the popular music satirist who taught musical mathematics at UC Santa Cruz among other universities, died Saturday at the age of 97 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Associated Press reported Sunday. Below is a Lookout profile of Lehrer by journalist Richard Stockton originally published in July 2024.

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I wanted to know: “What happened to Tom Lehrer? Is he alive?” 

I was searching for why the godfather of musical satire, the man who advocated poisoning pigeons in the park, moved to Santa Cruz in 1972, after he bailed from global fame.

My calls to every Santa Cruz musician I knew felt like a treadmill to oblivion; they all had passionate testimonials for Tom Lehrer’s genius and influence, but led down a blind alley every time. The Tom Lehrer trail had vanished. 

How does a charismatic musical icon live in a small town for 47 years and disappear without anyone knowing where he is, or even if he is alive? He is famous for turning down interviews (“I’m a man who can’t say yes’’) but I kept thinking that if I could just find someone he kept in touch with, maybe I could find out what happened to him and learn why he chose to live in Santa Cruz in the first place. 

I had to find out the roots of the man whose hilarious, dark black songs became popular in the white-bread era of the 1950s and 1960s, the one radio archivist Dr. Demento called “the most brilliant song satirist ever recorded.” 

He lived in Santa Cruz six months a year for 47 years, beginning in 1972.

And the memory of those days still persists and has been kept alive. Kuumbwa Jazz Center regularly hosted annual Lehrer singalongs, pre-pandemic. And Snazzy Productions’ Ron Sandidge tells Lookout he intends to mount a new local production of Lehrer’s songs this fall. Fascination with his work has continued globally, with “Tomfoolery,” a production based on Lehrer’s songs, presented from Seattle to Stuttgart, as recently as August 2023, over time. “Tomfoolery” was performed at Cabrillo College in July 2021.

In those early days, Lehrer’s musical mathematics classes at UCSC were wildly popular, and Santa Cruzans got to experience casual brushes with his greatness at the Crow’s Nest, Shopper’s Corner, in tap-dancing classes, or at the Museum of Art and History. Everyone I interviewed who met Tom talked about what an effortlessly likable man he is; witty, so funny and obviously caring. How did we get so lucky? 

Tom Lehrer was a child prodigy in mathematics and on piano. He entered Harvard University at 15, studied math and graduated at 19. He started playing songs to entertain his fellow classmates and at 25 self-produced an album, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” that launched his musical career. 

At 37, in one of his classic, repeated lines, he wrote, “It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.”

In the ‘50s and ‘60s he recorded 37 songs, played 109 performances and sold hundreds of thousands of records without getting played on the radio; the records sold by word of mouth. Record companies and radio stations said he went too far, missing the point that going too far was exactly the point. 

How far?

His love song “I Hold Your Hand in Mine” is about a severed hand. 

As biting and inciting as his political and topical satire is, the lyrics are not set to folk or rock music, but are instead rippling musical theater pieces performed with classical pianist virtuosity. One of his most famous songs is “The Elements,” where he sets the elements of the periodic table to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Major General’s Song.” By 1965, when he stopped performing, he had found commercial success with new albums, increased radio play time and a job writing for the satirical news TV show “That Was the Week That Was.”

Looking in all the wrong places?

I was rewatching my favorite Tom Lehrer interview, the one where he sings about his passion for math, and it dawned on me that I was looking in the wrong place to locate him.

He is not about hanging with musicians; his heart is in mathematics. His passion was teaching at UC Santa Cruz, where he served on the mathematics faculty for 29 years. 

I wrote 22 emails, one to every math professor at UCSC. The replies came in, “Would love to have known him” “… before my time here”…. “Have no idea …”

Then, I got a reply from UCSC Distinguished Professor Anthony Tromba. He was on the hiring committee in 1972 when Tom Lehrer applied to lecture at UCSC. Tromba had been his advocate and got Tom the job. 

I called Professor Tromba and asked if he knew where Tom Lehrer is now. 

“I last physically saw Tom at the Crow’s Nest, before he went back to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2019,” he told me. “He loved the Crow’s Nest. He really enjoyed being here. I got an email from him last year.” 

Tromba shared some of Tom Lehrer’s more recent email: 

Ahoy Tony

What a pleasant surprise to hear from you! I don’t always know who is still around from the old days. The catalog still lists you as in the Math Department, so I guess you have not yet retired.

I am vertical (almost), ambulatory (albeit with cane), and (reasonably) coherent, and I hope you are doing well. My malady is called “being 95” — it is incurable but not contagious. I am in Cambridge now, and there is no chance that I will be back in Santa Cruz in the near future.

In any event, Tony, you have my best wishes.

Tom

So, why did Lehrer choose Santa Cruz? Perhaps, according to Tromba, it was the other way around: 

UCSC chose him. 

At UCSC’s dawn, the campus began its bold experiment with interdisciplinary education, and Lehrer was a perfect fit. His passions were two: mathematics and musical theater. He was not only brilliant at both, but he would combine the two disciplines at a genius level. From the beginning, his two classes in math and theater were wildly popular. You had to audition to get into his “American Musical Theater” class.

Professor Anthony Tromba was on the hiring committee in 1972 when Tom Lehrer applied to lecture at UCSC. 

“How many mathematicians do you know who are also entertainers?” he recalls. “Where in the world could he have been at a major university that would allow him to do musical comedy and mathematics at the same time? Really, where else could Tom Lehrer have gone?”

Lehrer called Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, but in the early ‘60s he had regularly performed in San Francisco and came to know Santa Cruz. 

Bruce Bratton, Santa Cruz raconteur, musician, radio host and film critic, vividly recalls those days.

Bratton’s ‘60s trio, The Goodtime Washboard 3, performed in San Francisco during the early ’60s at the fabled North Beach nightclub The Hungry I, which hosted among others Woody Allen, Mort Sahl and Lehrer. 

Lehrer would lift the IQ of the audiences, as well as the rest of the entertainers,” explains Bratton. 

Lehrer came to Santa Cruz for half the year to escape the cold weather of Massachusetts, said Tromba. Lehrer revealed another reason for his coming to UCSC in an interview he gave on BBC Radio in 1980.

“I had been teaching at M.I.T. for nine years in the political science department, and it got to be less and less fun. I was teaching quantitative courses, and they began to take the science part of their name much more seriously than it deserves. (Laughter.) I decided that I was too old not to have fun, that I needed to go someplace that was fun, and Santa Cruz was set up for fun.” 

He decided to buy a home in Santa Cruz on the beach just south of Pleasure Point.

“I teach a course in Applications of Mathematics to Social Science,” he continued in that 1980 interview.

“There are very few of them. (Laughter.) It’s mainly a device to proselytize for mathematics … to show people that mathematics, contrary to a very popular belief, is not just a method of solving problems, but is a way of looking at the world.” Lehrer pointed out that anything from the newspapers could fall under the heading of social science, “I can basically do anything.” 

The other course he taught was called “The American Musical,” which had been his passion for so long. “We do reading performances of American musicals, one every two weeks.” Lehrer said. “I mainly cover the years from ‘Pal Joey’ to ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’” 

“In his classes at UCSC, he would sing a lot. He would be talking about something dead serious, and then break off into song, always underlying his thesis,” remembers Bratton.

Having gotten that close to his Santa Cruz story, I found a Cambridge phone number that apparently was his.

I did call those numbers this morning and Tom Lehrer answered one of them, the Cambridge, MA number. After identifying myself, I asked for a word with him.

“Oh, no, no, no. I have a box full of interviews about me or articles about me and I don’t need another one, but thank you for your interest.” That was it, true to his history.

Lehrer lectured at UCSC for 30 years, without tenure, and in 2001, the university told him he had to undergo a major review. 

“He’d already been here for 30 years!” said Tromba. “So, he just said, ‘I’m not going to participate.’ You know, he couldn’t give a shit anymore, he was ready to retire anyway. The whole atmosphere had changed for Tom and I’m sure that played a role. But in the early years he fit right in and gave students a diverse, wonderful experience, where scientists could do musical comedy, and where they could get in touch with literature and the arts and humanities. Tom fit in beautifully.” 

In 2001, Tom Lehrer gave his last mathematics class, on the topic of infinity.

In 2020, Lehrer signed away all of his works into the public domain. 

He stopped writing satire long ago. In explanation, he famously said, “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” 

Perhaps Tom Lehrer’s most-quoted one-liner about satirizing current affairs is, “I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.”

At 96, his work, his impact and his legacy thrive in Santa Cruz. He quit producing satirical recordings more than 50 years ago. Today, we can be astonished by how relevant these songs are to our current culture and politics. 

Perhaps his own explanation of his success fits the tenor of our times: “Always predict the worst and you’ll be hailed as a prophet.”

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