Poisoning pidgeons

Bless YouTube! Who better helps preserve our cultural heritage for future generations? This is Tom Lehrer, the American satirist, encouraging you to join him in a highly pleasurable springtime pursuit (yes, I know, it’s a bit early in the year).

Tom Lehrer is the person who taught me English. I got his That Was the Year That Was LP when I was 12 and I didn’t understand half of it. I looked up the lyrics in a big dictionary and asked my teacher about the words I couldn’t find. What, after all, does “dispose of a pigeon” actually mean? To this day, I’m proud to speak Lehrer’s English rather than the Queen’s.

Lehrer got a BA in mathematics at Harvard when he was 18 and a MA at 19. He taught math and musical comedy at the U of California most of his life. Strangely he didn’t record anything after 1965. He is one of my all-time heroes and thanks to YouTube he’s still with us.

The lyrics are here.

I was just going to say that “there’s no one like Tom Lehrer anymore,” but of course that’s not true. Check out Mitch Benn and his “Crap Your Pants for America.” Not surprisingly, Mitch credits Lehrer as one of his inspirations.