Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Tom Lehrer was a singer/songwriter who did funny songs back in the 60s. He was an undergrad at Harvard and he wrote songs to amuse his friends and eventually ended up touring all over the world. There is very little footage of him performing live, but Youtube has a few videos made by others that feature his music. I'll post a few below the fold.
Here's a clever video to accompany a Lehrer song called The Elements, in which he sang the entire periodic chart to a rather jaunty tune:
Here's an animated video for The Masochism Tango:
This one is rather odd. It splices in scenes from the Star Wars movies but the music is Lehrer's We Will All Go Together When We Go:
Comments
The Elements is sung to Gilbert and Sullivan's "A Modern Major General".
Posted by: Paige | April 14, 2007 12:57 PM
Lehrer is. At least I think.
I have three albums of Lehrer. It's good stuff. One must actually listen, and if one has a smattering of education, they're even funnier.
Posted by: Ed Darrell | April 14, 2007 1:06 PM
Tom Lehrer rules. My dad got into him in the 60s while going to college in Cambridge, Ma and had several (all?) of his albums. His live albums are the best, his stage banter is hilarious.
Posted by: jba | April 14, 2007 1:14 PM
A lyrical genius, with a distinct style and unforgettably nasal voice. It's amazing how well most of his material has held up, in contrast to the ephemeral "wit" of the Capitol Steps, who owe pretty much everything to Lehrer.
Posted by: Jim Anderson | April 14, 2007 1:15 PM
I personally like Mike Stanfill's animation of "The Elements" better than the one you've linked above, Ed. I'm not certain which came first (though I am certain that I saw Stanfill's version long before the 2006 copyright date he gives on the page), so I cannot say which one is derivative of the other.
Posted by: meatbrain | April 14, 2007 1:31 PM
Lehrer is definitely still alive and well (at the age of almost 80), but he has not performed live since the 1960s. He has done a number of interviews in the past few years, though.
Posted by: Dave K | April 14, 2007 4:52 PM
Tom Lehrer came to my campus to campaign for George McGovern. After confessing that everyone he ever campaigned for lost, he did a round of songs that I have never heard on any of the albums. He also performed some numbers he did for The Electric Company. He said he hoped that someday some kid would see Rigoletto and claim that "Caro Nome" was stolen from "I'm a very mangy hound."
Posted by: barkdog | April 14, 2007 10:13 PM
Lehrer is one of the all-time-greats at comic rhyming. "When they see us coming, the birdies all try and hide; / But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide" ("Poisoning Pigeons in the Park") "As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense: / 'To be smut, it must be ut - terly without redeeming social importance!'" ("Smut")...
Posted by: Jeffrey Kramer | April 14, 2007 11:42 PM
My favorites: Vatican Rag ("First you get down on your knees / fiddle with your rosaries / bow your head with great respect / then genuflect, genuflect, genuflect") and National Brotherhood Week. I seem to recall that the latter was featured on That Was the Week That Was (aka TW3). Does anyone else remember whether Lehrer was a regular on TW3?
Posted by: Gerry L | April 15, 2007 2:47 AM
Gerry L: That's before my time, but one of his albums is called "That Was the Year That Was", and the songs on it are more time-specific than some of his other work - there's one on Hubert Humphrey, one about the death of Alma Mahler, etc. I think I read somewhere that they were songs he did for TW3.
In regards to live footage of Lehrer, he did a show at the Copenhagen university which was recorded in its entirety. I don't know if it's anywhere on YouTube, though.
Posted by: konrad_arflane | April 15, 2007 2:53 AM
He was a math teacher at Harvard -- I don't think he was a full Professor, but he wasn't a student.
"That Was The Year That Was" is time-specific because Lehrer did the music for the weekly satirical News Show THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS (The American version of the British show.) This album was the music from the show.
The detective story writer, Stanton Forbes -- who was as weird as Lehrer, at least, (I use the word as a compliment) and as worth knowing -- did a book based on Lehrer's "The Irish Jaunting Song" but I sadly lost my copy and can't remember which one it was.
And one final word
"Let no one's work evade your eyes..."
Posted by: Prup aka Jim Benton | April 15, 2007 10:10 AM
Lehrer is definitely still alive and well (at the age of almost 80), but he has not performed live since the 1960s. He has done a number of interviews in the past few years, though.
Posted by: Dave K | April 14, 2007 04:52 PM
OK, so I just read that Don Ho is dead, right after Kurt Vonnegut. Are we on a Death Watch for Tom Lehrer?
Posted by: Daniel Kim | April 15, 2007 10:39 AM
"A half ton of angry pot roast."
Posted by: khan | April 15, 2007 12:29 PM
Rhino Records has a very good boxed set of Tom Lehrer, http://www.rhino.com/store/ProductDetail.lasso?Number=79831 , which comes with some commentary by Dr. Demento, and a pretty extensive bio. I don't if it's absolutely everything he ever recorded, but it's most of it and some songs come in both studio and live versions. Well worth having.
It's amazing how well these songs have held up in the 40-50 years since they were written. Topical political humor usually has a shelf life of about a month, but even the political songs are still startlingly relevant (and VERY funny).
Posted by: MS | April 15, 2007 2:46 PM
For those unfamiliar with the corpus of Lehrer, here's a list complete with lyrics. But really, buy the CD set. As MS said... amazing how current they still are and how hilarious...
(With president Johnson practicing escalattio on the Vietnamese...)
Posted by: decrepitoldfool | April 15, 2007 4:00 PM
I've been a Tom Lehrer fan since 1972. Wish he were still a part of the scene. Love what he said about political humor - that it became obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.
Posted by: David | April 15, 2007 10:27 PM
Actually, he died within the last year. So the death watch is a little late...
Posted by: textivore | April 16, 2007 10:24 PM
I was introduced to Lehrer in or about 1963 by a math professor, a friend of my father's. He had the first album, which had no political humor but lots of what to this then 10th grader seemed pretty edgy, such as "The Old Dope Peddler" ("doing well by doing good") and "Be Prepared," a take-off on the Boy Scouts' motto ("Don't solicit for your sister -- that's not nice! -- unless you get a good percentage of her price!"). TW3 was a revelation, so utterly unlike anything else on the air at the time. (If he's dead, Google News hasn't heard about it, so I don't believe it.)
Posted by: Eisweino | April 21, 2008 1:05 AM
I enjoyed this blog, although I discovered it far too late. Now I understand that all the comments were written in early 2007, before a video recorded Tom Lehrer performance appeared on YouTube. Lehrer has indeed said that he is fine with The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel. The performance - recorded in 1967- is not available on VHS and DVD but can be enjoyed on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/6funswede
Posted by: 6funswede | April 18, 2009 7:03 AM