Stop clapping, this is serious
March 1 2003
"I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them."
The speaker is Tom Lehrer, arguably the most famous living satirical songwriter. And, in a roundabout way, the New York-born singer, composer and mathematician is explaining why he has been all but silent since 1965.
It's 50 years since Lehrer's first recordings, and 38 years since his last album of new material, yet word that we've secured an interview has people around the office launching into such unlikely yet infectious ditties as The Vatican Rag, Smut and Lehrer's ode to spring pursuits, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.
It also has people asking with a surprised tone: "Is he still alive?" Yes, Lehrer is very much with us, despite being quiet for so long (he once told The New York Times he had encouraged rumours of his demise in the hope of cutting down junk mail). And the writer of the nuclear holocaust anthem We Will All Go Together When We Go, and the prescient Pollution, is as feisty and as funny as ever. He just isn't doing anything about it.
... Years ago, Lehrer quipped: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." And he wasn't being entirely flippant. Almost everything about the world of entertainment and politics has changed and he doesn't see any room for a modern-day Tom Lehrer.
"With audiences nowadays I see it with these late-night [TV show] people, Jay Leno, David Letterman and so on the audience applauds the jokes rather than laughs at them, which is very discouraging.
"Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh. But you can easily clap just to say [deadpan]: 'A ha, that's funny, I think that's funny.' Sometimes they cut to the audience and you can see they are applauding madly. But they're not laughing."
Then there are the issues themselves. When Lehrer talks in his still-boyish voice about vaporising Bush, he quickly adds: "And that's not funny." It's hard not to laugh, nonetheless, if only because of the sudden change of tone accompanying the word vaporise.
"OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire," he says.
The issues during the Cold War days of mutually assured destruction were, Lehrer insists, easier to make fun of. "Things are much more complicated. Feminism versus pornography, for example. There are a lot of feminists who think it is bad, but others think it's good.
"I have become, you might call it mature I would call it senile and I can see both sides. But you can't write a satirical song with 'but on the other hand' in it, or 'however'. It's got to be one-sided.
"The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines."
Telling sophisticated jokes about politics is something Lehrer believes works only in clubs such as the hungry i in San Francisco. Those clubs don't exist any more, nor, he reasons, do the audiences that once filled them.
"The people who go to comedy shows are kids that don't know anything, I think, and so you have to make jokes about your girlfriend or your family or that kind of thing only, make them as vulgar as possible."
Television has taken over the mainstream comedy beat, he says, and generally won't stand for partisan political humour because it will offend half the potential audience. "One of the problems I see with these comics on television, particularly cable television, is, since you can say anything in terms of sex and scatological references and so on, therefore, you should do it. So they all limit themselves to these subjects and this vocabulary. My objection is that it is a lack of articulateness."
He adds that it's not funny just to say something insulting about the president. "Irreverence is easy, but what is hard is wit. Wit is what these comedians lack." Lehrer admires Eddie Izzard and a small number of other modern comics, but has no solutions to what he sees as a decline in political satire.
He says he couldn't do anything with the Israelis and the Palestinians "because I'm against everybody and I can't take a side". Nor can the man who found so many snappy couplets and delightful tunes in impending nuclear doom see any toe-tapping inspiration in September 11, the invasion of Iraq, or the thing he seems most keen to talk about the Columbia space shuttle explosion.
"They are calling it a disaster instead of a screw-up, which is all it was. They're calling these people heroes. The Columbia isn't a disaster. The disaster is that they're continuing this stupid program.
"One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record That Was the Year that Was in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon.
"I was against the manned space program then and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money. And so, when seven people blow up or become confetti, then they've asked for it. They're volunteers, for one thing."
Not the sort of sentiments that will get you air time in the US at the moment, he agrees. And clearly signs of a man who is getting highly passionate, yet who acknowledges such a condition is bad for humour. "That's what happened to [satirist] Lenny Bruce. He got angry, and then he wasn't funny any more. You have your choice there." ...
Sadly, though, Lehrer is of the opinion that while satire may attract attention to an issue, it doesn't achieve a lot else.
"The audience usually has to be with you, I'm afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was titillating the converted.
"The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be."
His favourite quote on the subject is from British comedian Peter Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in 1961, said it was to be a satirical venue modelled on "those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War". ...
<http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/28/1046407753895.html>
Carl
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