College professor and satirist Tom Lehrer has died at 97. Chris Morris reports at Variety:
Tom Lehrer, the sardonic singer-songwriter-pianist who rose to national fame after his dark, tartly funny topical songs were used on the comedic ‘60s TV news show “That Was the Week That Was,” has died at age 97.
Friends said that he was found dead in his home in Cambridge, Mass., on Saturday.
Lehrer, who acquired an underground audience in the early ‘50s with a pair of self-released albums, was by trade a professor who taught mathematics, first at Harvard and later in his career at UC Santa Cruz. He told one concert audience, “I don’t like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn’t as though I had to do this. I could be making, oh, $3,000 a year just teaching.”
The Harvard from which he matriculated and at which he taught was a different Harvard. The America he satirized was a different America. Few watched TW3 60 years ago. Even fewer remember it today.
Every generation thinks it invented satire, cf. Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind, written by Carl Sandburg over a century ago in 1922.
The past is a bucket of ashes.
Whi is doing satire now? I cant think of anyone especially famous for doing satire. It’s difficult when reality is so screwy.
Steve
That was a pleasant trip thru memory, David Frost, as a stand up comedian, a a song about tobacco as the Indians revenge and the A Bomb song. Ash also helps things grow, even if the only crop is SouthPark.