Say it with a song

The legacy of the late Tom Lehrer, satire's sweetest assassin

Tom Lehrer performing in Copenhagen, 1967

Tom Lehrer never needed to shout to be heard. He just sat down at the piano, smiled sweetly, and sang about nuclear war, venereal disease, or killing pigeons. His satire wasn’t angry or bitter either. It was playful, subversive, and cheerfully delivered in a musical theater voice.

Earlier this week on July 26, Lehrer passed away at the age of 97 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As we say goodbye to this legend, we celebrate a man who reminds us that free speech isn’t just a legal concept. It’s a cultural one. One that lives or dies not just in the courts, but in our collective willingness to laugh, to listen, and to be challenged.

To younger audiences, his name might not register immediately (though they’re likely familiar with his beloved invention, the Jello shot). But Lehrer deserves a place alongside George Carlin and Lenny Bruce as one of the best satirists of the 20th century. And like those comic greats, he too loved skirting the line between the humorous and the offensively irreverent. But, of course, there was an art even to being offensive. “Irreverence is easy,” he once said, “but what is hard is wit.”

Still, even when witty, that irreverence often came at a cost. And Lehrer was always witty. His debut album was banned in the Australian states of Victoria and Queensland. The BBC banned 10 of its 12 songs. In the United States, his work was treated as radioactive. Lehrer’s albums sold well, but were rarely played on the radio. One teacher in New York was fired for playing Lehrer’s song “The Vatican Rag” to a seventh-grade class as an example of satire.

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

All the while, Lehrer worked as a professor — first of mathematics at Harvard and MIT, and later of musical theater and satire at UC Santa Cruz. He spent his life in the classroom and the public square, two places where free expression remains contested. Today, professors face mounting scrutiny and increasing pressure for challenging orthodoxies, whether in their research, teaching, or posts on social media. In many ways, Lehrer was ahead of his time not just in subject matter, but in the risks he took simply by speaking freely.

In 2022, Lehrer made perhaps his most powerful statement: He released his entire body of work into the public domain, freely sharing his art for others to use without asking for anything in return. In other words, he didn’t just practice free expression, or take it to its legal limit. He also helped fuel it. And by handing his work over to the public, he also bypassed would-be censors. “So help yourselves,” he said in his statement announcing the decision, “and don’t send me any money.”

One of his most pointed songs, Smut, takes on the morality police and defenders of “decency” with cheerful contempt. The song begins:

I do have a cause, though; it is obscenity.
I’m for it! Thank you. Unfortunately, the
civil liberties types who are fighting this
issue have to fight it, owing to the nature
of the laws, as a matter of freedom of
speech and stifling of free expression
and so on, but we know what’s really
involved: dirty books are fun!

The song is a defense of intellectual freedom, rejecting the notion that we must be protected from dangerous ideas, and insisting instead that culture doesn’t need a filter. That satire is more than entertainment. That humor is the most enjoyable form of honesty and the best test of whether we truly believe in free expression.

Lehrer’s legacy reminds us that censorship isn’t just imposed from above. It can also be enforced from below — through silence, shame, or the threat of social and professional ruin. But the antidote, then as now, is clear: Speak honestly. Laugh loudly. Share freely. Or as Lehrer himself wrote in the liner notes to the 1997 compilation “Songs & More Songs by Tom Lehrer”:

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.

He was, as always, joking around — while being entirely serious about the power of satire to stir people to action. So today, we remember the late Tom Lehrer not just for his brilliance, but for his bravery. He showed us the monsters under our beds, and then taught us to laugh at them. He helped us think the unthinkable. And he showed us that the freedom to speak only matters when we’re willing to use it.