A match made in heaven

Tom Lehrer (making fun on purpose) and George Lucas (who, even more hilariously, was by all accounts taking himself seriously): "We Will All Go Together When We Go." Except that when friends and family went to Star Wars Episodes II and III, they bloody well went without me. If I wanted to indulge in masochism...well, there's a Tom Lehrer song for that, too, but my kids read this blog. Or at least their friends do occasionally.

Only Lehrer, after all, could with a carefully straight face make "Te Deum" rhyme with "ICBM."

As I sit here it occurs to me that my teenagers' generation probably doesn't have a clue of the degree to which the fear -- for many, the perceived near-certainty -- of nuclear holocaust dominated the Cold War era. I never feel older than when reflecting on the fact that my twenty-year-old daughter from Kazakhstan has no memory of the Soviet Union. A Canticle for Liebowitz seems as bizarre and non-topical to my kids, I would imagine, as 1984 and Brave New World seemed to me in the '80's...even though the chance of a nuclear bomb hitting an American city is probably higher now than it was back when you could still, without doing nostalgia schtick, make a movie like War Games.

At any rate, here's Lehrer, contemplating the prospect of universal nuclear annihilation and -- as was ever his wont -- looking on the bright side.



Since we're on the subject of Lehrer, here are a few more clips...he's funnier, I think, on LP/CD than in the older clips you can find on YouTube, because (a) his visual presentation actually isn't very skillful and, to my surprise, detracts rather than enhances, and (b) the patter in between is missing, which is too bad because there's some good stuff in the stand-up (if you can call it stand-up when he's sitting on a piano bench). "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" probably is only funny if you're a city dweller, and if you don't know your history you may not understand who Wernher von Braun (much less Mrs. Wallace) was, but for us old guys, this was funny stuff.

I've always really liked "New Math," and used to be able to reel the thing off at speed...and I'm just as glad my kids won't catch the "Tropic of Calculus" joke (though actually any 50-Cent song they listen to is probably way worse than what was so shocking back then). The dude doing the lip-synching is, of course, not the great man himself.



I'll throw in a family tidbit here that I've always thought showed something about my paternal grandfather (who died two years before I was born) that I find delightful: having dropped out of school in eighth grade because he hated fractions, he found that it really bothered him for years to consider himself a quitter. So fairly late in life, he signed up for night school, went back, and learned his fractions -- and as soon as the section on fractions was over, he dusted the pencil dust off his hands, walked out of the classroom in satisfaction, and never went back.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, Tom Lehrer his very own self gives you Wernher von Braun.



And of course there's the theme song Lehrer thoughtfully provided in advance for World War III:



Alas, no "Proliferation" appears to have made it onto YouTube.

You can browse around for other Lehrer stuff using the YouTube search engine, if you're curious. (He covers other topics besides the cold war -- he famously set the periodic table to music, wrote a happy-tempo Latin-beat paean to industrial pollution, etc.)