There never was a time like the 1950s — not even during the 1950s. Not if you have in mind the decade of conformity, of moms in pearls and churchgoing families, of patriotic youth and apple pies cooling on the sills of tidy new suburban homes. The ’50s were a time of protest, division and disillusionment. Tom Lehrer set it to bouncy music and satirical lyrics.
Tom Lehrer was the face of the real 1950s
It was a decade of protest and disillusionment. He set it to bouncy music and satirical lyrics.
The Washington Post, July 28, 2025
Tom
Lehrer performing at San Francisco's Hungry i nightclub in 1965. (Ted
Streshinsky/Getty Images) (Ted Streshinsky Photographic Archive/Getty
Images)
4 min
A mathematical prodigy from a wealthy family with a fondness for the light comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, Lehrer was to social criticism what Cole Porter was to sex — proof there is no better way to say the unsayable than with witty rhymes and toe-tapping rhythms.
Sex being far more popular than social criticism, Porter is more famous than Lehrer, who died at 97 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday. The comparison meant little to Lehrer, who never courted audiences and stopped composing and recording before his life was even half through. His primary occupation was teaching math at Harvard, MIT and other top universities. Lehrer might be best known not for his songs but for his quip explaining why he quit: “Political satire became obsolete,” he said, “when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Still, the real 1950s can be glimpsed in the early arc of Lehrer’s work. Born in 1928, he was too young to fight in World War II, but not too young to learn from that catastrophe that human nature can be dangerous. With World War III menacing just around the corner, Lehrer was not going to let any -isms — nationalism, patriotism, imperialism, fascism, communism — sweep him along as they swept previous generations.
His first song, written after his graduation from Harvard at 18 and still eager to delight his prep school pals, was a spoof, not a satire. Over thundering piano chords evoking a marching band, Lehrer took fight songs down a notch. “Hurl that spheroid down the field,” he sang in the tones of the highborn and well-mannered prep school grads who were his pals. “Won’t it be peachy if we win the game?”
Then the ’50s happened. By decade’s end, Lehrer was recording and performing “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” in which the nuclear holocaust plays out across successive upbeat stanzas: We will all go together, fry together, bake together, char together and so on. “Mr. Lehrer’s muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste,” sniffed a New York Times reviewer.
The Cold War made a lot of people very angry, and some of them could be hilarious. Turning 30 and taking wing with Lehrer in the 1950s was Lenny Bruce, the original shock comedian; poet Allen Ginsberg, who imagined Walt Whitman at the grocery store casting lascivious looks at the stock boy; Joseph Heller, whose novel “Catch-22” would define the bureaucratic inanity of modern war; and the team of Terry Southern, Stanley Kubrick and Peter George, who wrote the greatest satire yet put on film, “Dr. Strangelove.”
“So long mom/ I’m off to drop the bomb,” Lehrer wrote in the musical equivalent of “Strangelove.” As the 1960s took shape, his ever-cheerful piano contrasted with increasingly pointed lyrics — always rendered in delightful, virtuosic rhymes.
Lehrer skewered the cynical relationship between the U.S. military and German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, whose sins America forgave to keep him out of Soviet hands. Von Braun traded his laboratory in Hitler’s Germany for one in Huntsville, Alabama. “Nazi, schmatzi, says Wernher von Braun,” Lehrer sang.
Vatican II modernized Roman Catholicism. Lehrer’s interpretation was: “Do what steps if you want if/ You have cleared them with the pontiff.” In a nation torn by upheaval, he found “National Brotherhood Week” to be thin gruel: “It’s only for a week so have no fear/ Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.”
Lehrer’s songbook is small but influential: Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe called him “the cleverest and funniest man of the 20th century.” A mere hour with Lehrer’s work on YouTube can make a good start toward expertise.
He might look tame at his grand piano with his dark suit, white shirt and tie. But Lehrer’s contemporary was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in the same uniform, cloaking the era of tumult in conservative garb. He was the peer of Sidney Poitier, wearing the same outfit.
We owe much to the children of the 1920s who became the leaders of the 1950s. They were more than Ward and June Cleaver. They did more than dance at the hop. They unleashed the antiestablishment energy that defines us today.
Energy that, for better and worse, defines human nature.