I'm Baaaack!

Tom Lehrer, RIP. What are your favorite Lehrer songs?

Sorry about the intermittent posting, but I was out of my closet for most of the last three weeks, first attending a conference near Berlin for a week, then ten nights of tourism (Prague, Vienna, Krakow, and Warsaw), two nights home, then a wedding in the San Francisco Bay Area.

So, here’s an un-paywalled post that anybody can comment upon. (Paywalled posts, which pay my bills, will follow.)

What’s are your favorite Tom Lehrer (1928-2025) songs? The mathematicians turned his songs over to the public domain a few years ago, so here’s a good list.

Lehrer was a teenager during the 1940s when American enjoyed an enormous variety of popular songs styles in which the audience could understand the lyrics. The electric guitar didn’t begin to overwhelm the clarity of the lyrics until Lehrer was around 30 and thus no longer interested in new styles, especially ones in which tricky, clever lyrics were pointless. Thus he called rock ‘n’ roll “children’s music.”

Lots of folks like the mathematician Lehrer’s “Lobachevsky,”

Although Lehrer was upfront about his plagiarism songe plagiarizing from his idol’s Danny Kaye’s “Stanislavsky:”

I like “Alma” because I occasionally make jokes about Alma Mahler’s fondness for great men (Lehrer sticks to her husbands and leaves out mere boyfriend Oskar Kokoschka)

when I call somebody in the news “the Alma Mahler of our Age of Brass.”

But there are many more.

What do you think?