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Tom Lehrer: Difference between revisions
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Tom Lehrer is an American satirist who managed to achieve remarkable popularity and impact on popular culture, despite having produced only three albums' worth of material in the 1950's and 60's before retiring to a life in academia as a mathematician. Lehrer's pieces often take the form of witty parodies of various popular song-forms. Other common themes in his work are disapproval of [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|nuclear war, Cold War politics, and folk singing]]. Of course, he undercuts that last by putting forth as perfect a rendition of such songs as can be done with only a piano ("imagine that I am playing an 88-string guitar") as accompaniment.
Lehrer is still alive (as of November 2022), and occasionally performing. At the 80th birthday party of a fellow mathematician and friend Irving "Kaps" Kaplansky, [http://www.archive.org/details/lehrer he dusted off a handful of mathematics songs] to an appreciative crowd of students and fellow mathematicians.
[["Weird Al" Yankovic]] cites Tom Lehrer as one of his inspirations. Lehrer's own inspirations notably include [[Gilbert and Sullivan]] and [[Cole Porter]]. Allegedly, he invented the [[wikipedia:Gelatin dessert#Gelatin shots|Jell-O shot]].
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(Note: These lists may not be complete. As you can see, he's ''quite'' popular on this wiki).
On November 1, 2022, [https://web.archive.org/web/20221101152524/https://tomlehrersongs.com/ Tom Lehrer placed his entire back catalog into the Public Domain and made copies of the songs available for download].
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