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Satire, as George S. Kaufman aptly observed, is what closes on Saturday night. This implies that its circulation is limited because of its low initial interest. Another principle might be added: even if satire makes it to the Wednesday afternoon show circuit, it will do so because of its precision and clarity of intent, which gives it no chance of surviving after its goals are forgotten. Narrow focus certainly precludes broad reach.
But at its core, satire—at least high-level satire—has been around as long as any other form of artistic expression. It keeps its objects alive by satirizing them, and, like a mineral, it replaces the original substance with its own material. No satirist has been more true to this than the great American songwriter Tom Lehrer, who died Saturday, his brief, firefly targets still glowing largely because of the ridicule he packed into them. By some strange coincidence, the composer had been playing a Tom Lehrer album for his young friends over the weekend, not realizing he was dying—or, to be fair, that he was still alive—and they responded immediately, even when the material was unfamiliar to them.
The album I listened to, recorded live in 1965, is Lehrer’s best, and even its title, That Was the Year That Was, illustrates the canning qualities of satire; it echoes the title of a short-lived American TV show, That Was the Week That Was, adapted from a successful British programme. The plots of TWTYTW are largely unfamiliar now: there’s a song satirising George Murphy, a minor Hollywood musical star who became a senator that year, beating out Ronald Reagan, also an actor turned California politician. Indeed, hints of Reagan’s political ambitions – he had not yet run, but had been a vocal supporter of Barry Goldwater the year before – are mentioned in the song’s opening chant, drawing incredulous laughter from the audience. (Now the joke gets another laugh.) There's another story about the travails of liberal hero Hubert Humphrey as Lyndon Johnson's vice president—and who remembers Humphrey now, or if they do, knows that he was once a liberal hero? Another song, “MLF Lullaby,” reflects a fleeting controversy about a NATO proposal for a “multilateral force” of nuclear warships and submarines with international crews. The proposal never got off the ground, but was saved from oblivion by Lehrer's observation that it implied West German access to nuclear weapons:
Once upon a time, all Germans were warlike and mean
But this must not happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918.
And since then they have hardly bothered us.
You don't need to know anything about the Liberation Front (and certainly some of the audience didn't initially) to get the joke. Likewise, if you're not familiar with Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who first worked for the Nazis and then for us, you'll learn all you need to know from Lehrer's ballad about him:
Vunsa Ze's rockets took off,
Who cares when they come down?
That is out of my range,
This is Wernher von Braun speaking.
This self-sufficiency—songs that delightfully preserve their heroes in formaldehyde—is part of what keeps Lehrer’s work alive. Indeed, some of his targets are truly enduring, like the anthem to the emptiness of National Brotherhood Week, which resonates all the more loudly now that we’re sinking ever deeper into empty piety. Likewise, introducing his “war song” about World War III, he explains that if songs are to be written about that conflict, “we better start writing them now.”
Among Lehrer’s talents was an extraordinary, easily overlooked musicality, the secret ingredient of his satire. One simple reason his songs endure is that, although they are written for the sake of lyrics, their melodies are hard to stop humming. His brilliant pianism kept him from falling into monotony, especially because of his extraordinary talent for musical pastiche, moving with ease from Broadway tunes to marches, songs, calypso, Christmas songs, folk ballads, flamenco, Viennese waltzes, Mozart, modern jazz, ragtime, and Gilbert and Sullivan. Meanwhile, the fact that he once adapted an actual Gilbert and Sullivan number into a song composed entirely of the names of elements in the periodic table points to his other amazing gift: he was not
Sourse: newyorker.com
