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Frances Beckett on the mystery of the great Tom Lehrer: in the 1950s and 60s, his songs stunned and delighted listeners with their irreverence, wit, and nihilism. Then he gave it all up to teach mathematics.

Beckett begins by recounting his own introduction to Lehrer, in 1959, at the “snobbish [British] Jesuit boarding school” to which his parents had sent him…

… Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral. Days there began with mass, and ended with an uplifting homily in the chapel from an elderly and skeletal priest, generally about death. “Your best friends will desert you leaving you nothing but a winding sheet,” was one of his more cheerful messages. Between the two there was catechism, rugby, occasional bullying and fairly frequent beatings.

But we had the “playroom”, where we could relax and listen to records, and one day an American boy called Ed Monaghan turned up clutching a Lehrer LP. It was a medicinal dose of the irreverence, nihilism and rebellion that I craved. To this day, I am word perfect in many of the songs I first heard then. There was Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, all about the joys of spring, and as darkly funny as its title suggests. There was the American football song Fight Fiercely, Harvard, which seemed to make cruel mock of those cold, dreary afternoons I was forced to spend watching my school play rugby. It was all done with such bouncing musicality that I doubt whether the Jesuits ever realised the subversive nature of what we were listening to.

Lehrer made my life bearable. I have never been able to tell him so, and it might not please him, for he has been quoted as saying: “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 worthwhile.”

I didn’t know then that Lehrer had started out, six years earlier, by paying to have his own record cut because the record companies were shocked by his songs, and selling the LP to fellow students at Harvard. This early samizdat recording was the underground success of the decade with almost no publicity effort from Lehrer – “My songs spread slowly, like herpes, rather than Ebola,” he later recalled.

At that time, Lehrer’s principal accomplishment was that he was a mathematics prodigy who had entered Harvard aged 15, in 1943, taken a first class degree aged 18 and a master’s a year later. Born into a New York Jewish family in 1928, Lehrer had, he has said, every advantage: piano lessons, an expensive school that could get him into Harvard, and “the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter.

In the next year or two, Ed Monaghan introduced me to other comedians who were turning the complacent world of American comedy on its head: Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce. “What these so-called ‘sickniks’ dispense,” wrote Time magazine in July 1959, “is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world.”

But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was. The new songs were made into a live LP, and it was even more wonderful than the old one. They included The Vatican Rag – a Catholic hymn set in ragtime: “There the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original.” Although I was by then a confirmed atheist, I probably still thought that making fun of the Catholic church would release a thunderbolt from heaven, and The Vatican Rag cured me.

The album also included three songs condemning nuclear weapons. “There’ll be no more pain and misery / When the world is our rotisserie …” They were so much better than those whiny folk songs of the era, which Lehrer rather despised. “You had to admire these folk singers,” he says on the live LP. “It takes courage to get up in a coffee house or a student auditorium and come out in favour of the things everyone else is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood, and so on.”

In this far more political new record, he satirised the Americans teaming up with West Germany against the USSR (“Once all the Germans were warlike and mean / But that couldn’t happen again / We taught them a lesson in 1918 / And they’ve hardly bothered us since then”), and was horrified that Hitler’s chief rocket scientist was now working for Washington, singing: “‘When the rockets go up who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

And then he gave it up again, and he has spent the rest of his life as an obscure mathematics lecturer. He lives in the house he has occupied for decades, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was 96 last month…

The quest to understand: “‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?” from @francisbeckett in @guardian.

A reminder: in 2020, Lehrer his lyrics, and free streaming and downloadable versions of all of his albums– a satirical gold mine: “Songs and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer.”

* Tom Lehrer

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As we appreciate art, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972, amid Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations, that the Sex Pistols threw a party aboard a boat called The Queen Elizabeth, inviting friends, journalists, and a film crew to sail along London’s River Thames– a promotion for the band’s new single, “God Save the Queen.” As the sun went down and the boat floated near the Houses of Parliament, the band lit up their amps and performed “Anarchy in the UK,” followed by “God Save the Queen,” “No Feelings,” and “Pretty Vacant.” Upon docking, the band and their fellow partygoers were met by police.