Tom Lehrer/YMMV

• Main
• YMMV
• Crowners
  • Funny
• Wikipedia
• All Subpages
• Create New
  Quotes Fanfic Recs Analysis Trivia WMG Image Links Haiku Laconic

/wiki/Tom Lehrercreator

• Crosses the Line Twice: "We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment, except for the few we take home to experiment!"
  • Another pair of examples is "The Old Dope Peddler", which was so over the top when it was written that people nearly died of laughter, but when performed to modern audiences, the laughter just . . . dies away by the end because it's too typical, and "The Masochism Tango", which is so over the top it still crosses the line in the day and age of the Obligatory Bondage Song.
  • And "We Will All Go Together When We Go", which was about a nuclear holocaust.

Just sing out a Te Deum When you see that ICBM And the party will be 'come as you are'!"

• Ear Worm: Quite a few if not all of his songs.
  • Dammit, I've had "2,4,6,8, time to transubstantiate" from "The Vatican Rag" in my head for a week now.
  • Richard Dawkins has claimed to have had "Masochism Tango" stuck in his head.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: His 1960s song "George Murphy," about a senator with a former showbiz career, gets a cheap laugh from the less-than-impressive career of another politician with similar background... Ronald Reagan.
  • He also played Harsher in Hindsight for a laugh, more recently saying this of "When You Are Old And Grey":

Lehrer: I must confess, I wrote that song when I was 21 years old and it doesn't seem quite so funny anymore...

• The Masochism Tango: The Trope Namer.
• Memetic Mutation: YTMND seems to like putting together "The Elements"/"New Math" together with a clip of Stan talking.
• Painful Rhyme: Done deliberately and brilliantly.
  • From "Lobachevsky":

Plagiarize, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!

• Squick: It is a considerable credit to his songwriting talents that even after nearly half a century and all the moral decay that entails, the Dead Baby Comedy of some of his lyrics can still turn a few heads.