Noted badass: Tom Lehrer

Sometimes you discover something so incredibly awesome that you're surprised you've survived so far without knowing about it. So you rant about it, spend hours on the internet learning more about it, and shout at people until they realize how awesome it is.

And eventually you have to move on with your life, because that kind of excitement is hard to sustain. It doesn't mean you love the thing any less. It just means that life happens, and you have to create space in your mind to appreciate even more awesome things.

In the spirit of spreading the epicness, I've decided to start sharing some of the things I have loved fiercely (and still do love, just with less active intensity).

So please, Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce the undervalued genius of Tom Lehrer:
 

"All the world seems in tune, on a fine afternoon, when we're poisoning pigeons in the park."

The thing about Tom is that he's so fucking great, I don't even know where to start. And the biggest tragedy is that almost nobody knows who he is.

So, who is he? 

 

Tom was born in 1928 and received his Masters in mathematics from Harvard in 1947. I'll point out that he was just about nineteen years old at the time. Nineteen fucking years old, guys.

Then again, by the time I was nineteen I had memorized the entirety of the dialogue, music and choreography of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I think it's clear who the winner is here. (It's me.)

From then on Tom taught classes at, among others, Harvard, MIT, and Wellesley.

He also somehow found time to invent the jello shot.*

But while he might have been a respected Harvard Professor by day, he was a brilliant nightclub satirist by night.

How it went down:

 

Tom wrote songs for fun while he was teaching at Harvard. He performed them a few times and received such a positive reaction that he paid $15 to record an album. He printed 400 copies and sold them informally, mostly to students.

Word of mouth did him a spectacular turn, though, and after a few months he was getting mail orders from all over the country. Then Princess Margaret in the UK mentioned that she liked him, and suddenly the world was aware of his existence.

He became massively popular for a while and toured a bit, but he quit after 109 live shows because he felt like it. You gotta give props to the man for not being a fame-whore.  I mean, at one point, he faced the question: I'm kinda tired. Do I keep on performing for adoring masses who laud my genius? Or do I go back to lecturing at Harvard?

And he chose Harvard.

The goods:

 

Tom Lehrer wrote satirical, black-humor songs about the world and times he lived in (America in, mainly, the fifties). Despite this, his most well-known song today is this one, which kids in classrooms are still given extra credit for memorizing:

 While it's a cool song, in a science-geek kind of way (which is the coolest cool there is, yo,) it's not at all representative of the bulk of his work.

His songs were about sexually transmitted diseases, nuclear bombs, pornography, commercialism, killing your family, and pretty much all things dark or scandalous.  It's impossible to describe them. So, in an attempt to sell you on his awesomeness, I'll give you a few excerpts instead. The bits in bold are the spoken introductions from the live album An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer.

{Bear in mind that he wrote and performed these songs during the fifties, a decade basically famous for conformity and repression.** I want everybody to just consider the caliber of brass balls that required.}


Here are a few bits from 'Smut':

"I do have a cause, though; it is obscenity... I'm for it. Thank you. [...] Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days, I have here a march for mine. It's called:

Smut!
Give me smut and nothing but!

[...]

Stories of tortures
used by debauchers,
lurid, licentious, and vile,
...make me smile.
Novels that pander
to my taste for candor
give me a pleasure sublime.
(Let's face it, I love slime.)

All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth (I'm glad to say) is in
the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
everything is lewd.
(I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)"

A few stanzas from The Masochism Tango (which has a trope named after it.): 

"I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,

But much more for the touch of your whips, dear.
You can raise welts
like nobody else,
As we dance to the masochism tango.

Say our love be a flame, not an ember,
Say it's me that you want to dismember.
Blacken my eye,
Set fire to my tie,
As we dance to the masochism tango."

Fifty Shades of Grey ain't got nothin' on this Harvard professor.

A little bit from The Vatican Rag (in which Tom attempts to help the Vatican 'sell their product' by re-doing their music in popular song forms.):

"First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And: genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional,
There the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.
If it is, try playin' it safer -
Drink the wine and chew the wafer
Two, four, six, eight-
Time to transubstantiate!"

{There would have been a picture here, but for some reason there are no GIFs of the Pope dancing anywhere on the internet. I'm disappointed.}

I'm sold! He sounds awesome. What do I do now?

 

I'm glad you asked. You can get his music. ALL of it.

Get An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer first, though. It's a live recording from 1959, and it's the best thing ever because of the little anecdotes he has in between songs. They're just as genius as the songs themselves.
Here's his iTunes page.
 This page has some great quotes by and about him, plus some amazon links to his best albums.

For more information on the man himself:
 His Wikipedia Page is good.
Here's an interview with him from 2000.
This page has pretty much all his lyrics, as well as transcriptions of the anecdotes on An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer. 
Here's an informative article about his current whereabouts. (He's still alive, y'all!)


I'll leave you with some words from the man himself:
"If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while."

 Thank you.
Go forth and spread the Lehrer word.


P.S. Tom: In case you're the kind of person that Googles themselves, and you've found this article, I really only have one thing to say to you:

Oh, and I hope you don't mind that I called you "Tom". In my mind, we're on a first-name basis.


_____________________________________________________________

* The invention of the jello shot is a contentious subject. The fact is, many people 'invented' it independently of each other.

Because, you know, humans have jello, and we have vodka, and it's only natural that it would occur to more than one person to mix the two.

Tom's story is particularly badass: 
He was in the Army for two years. Once they were having a 'Christmas office party'. However, they weren't allowed to have any booze because army rules stated that "alcoholic beverages" weren't allowed on base. So Tom and a friend came up with the idea of the jello shot, since jello, technically, isn't a beverage. They rocked up at the party with alcoholic jello.
And it worked.

**  A few years after Tom quit Lenny Bruce was arrested (and eventually literally prosecuted to death) just for swearing on stage.

A few of my favorite things. Well, one of them, really.

I really like black and white images. I also like history, old photographs, and mysteries. Allow me to introduce you to a picture that combines all of these things. It is the first known photograph ever taken of a human being. 

See if you can spot the person. Kind of like Where’s Wally? I call it Where's the Shadowy Unnamed Victorian Gentleman?

What do you mean, you can’t see any red and white stripes?

 

Didn’t see him? I didn’t the first time, either. Here, let me show you:

Here’s a close-up:

Even his fuzzy silhouette looks dapper and charming. I hereby dub thee ‘Mr Darcy'.

This photograph is called Boulevard du Temple and it was taken by a man called Louis Daguerre. It’s kind of a cool story.

One afternoon in 1838 in Paris, Louis Daguerre left his daguerreotype (a type of camera he had invented himself) in the window to take a photo of the Boulevard. At this time cameras were not used to take pictures of people. This is because the exposure time (in very simplified terms, the time it took to capture the image) was over ten minutes, and nobody could sit still long enough. Back then, if you walked right past the lens of a camera while it was taking a picture you wouldn’t even show up.

So Daguerre, when he put his daguerreotype in the window, was only planning to take a picture of the static objects, the buildings and trees and such. The Boulevard du Temple was actually a very busy street, so at the time the picture was taken there were loads of people and carriages passing by, only they don’t show up in the picture because they were moving. Pretty creepy, right?

So why, then, does the mystery man show up? Here’s the thing: during the exact minutes that Louis Daguerre put his camera on the window ledge, Mr. Darcy stopped to have his boots shined, and stood still just long enough that his image was captured on the camera he didn’t even know was there. The blurry shadow of the boy shining his boots is just visible if you look very carefully, although he isn’t nearly as crisp because, of course, he was moving.

Isn’t that fantastic? Getting your boots shined was just a routine, everyday thing in those days. On this particular day 200 years ago this gentleman gets his image captured forever, and then walks away none the wiser. He’s the first person ever to be photographed and we’ll never know who he was. And Mr Darcy probably lived out the rest of his life in complete ignorance, not knowing that two hundred years later people would be examining his posture, determining exactly what he was doing at that very moment, and writing articles about him on the internet.

So that’s the story of the Boulevard du Temple. I have a few other pictures I love, and most of them have nice histories, so I might be telling y’all about those in the future. Does anybody else have a favorite photograph?

[I wrote the majority of this article from memory. If any of the information is inaccurate it is completely my own fault.]