Tom Lehrer is incredibly witty and funny; he was a mathematician and performer who was active in the 1960's until the 1980's. Some of his stuff is a little dated but most of it is as relevant as ever.
I found three albums of his - "That was the year that was", "An evening wasted with Tom Lehrer" and "Antoher evening wasted". They cover the more famous parts of his repertoire, and for the rest you'll likely have to look through YouTube and the internet.
If you like Tom Lehrer then you might also enjoy his British contemporaries Flanders & Swann in "At the drop of a hat" and other albums.
With rare exceptions ("The laws of thermodynamics") they didn't write about the sciences, but they were musically a bit more sophisticated and just as witty.
Their satire was far less biting but was present. Although Michael Flanders did monologue: "The purpose of Satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth - and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again." :)
I recommend their delightful animal song "The Sloth" as having pertinence to my fellows in the HN audience who have trouble with procrastination...
On the topic of Flanders and Swann, their song about a gnu[0] (using the then non-standard pronunciation) was one of the inspirations for the naming the GNU project.
"Slow Train" about UK railway stations shut in the 60s is great (though about a third of the 28 mentioned were reprieved or reopened so it can seem a bit odd if you visit Chester-le-Street, say.)
Why is it distasteful? People on this planet speak different languages, and pronounce things in different ways... It was not mocking that he wasn't pronouncing things the same way we were, it was just an imitation of him. Is SNL distasteful when they imitate people?
I think "distasteful" it kind of a moot point when talking about Tom Lehrer's work. See: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Masochism Tango, I Hold Your Hand in Mine, etc.
I love his simple charisma. Ever flashy, just charming. In magic there's a form of magic in between close up magic and stage magic called "parlor magic". I've always thought he had great parlor presence.
On a separate note, I find it interesting that he's making casual jokes about himself being gay/bi. I don't know what the times were like, or really even when that video was made, but do wonder if that raised a few (more, I guess) eyebrows
I love Tom Lehrer, but I was a little taken aback when I learnt that Lobachevsky was a real mathematician and not as far as anyone knows a plagiarist. Seems harsh to skewer a (long-dead) guy's reputation with such a catchy song.
Yeah, that one took me a quite while to realize as well. As far as I now understand, Lobachevsky was a truly great mathematician and any accusations of plagiarism absolutely unfounded. Lehrer simply chose him because the name went well with the Danny Kaye song "Stanislawsky" which he was paraphrasing. Apparently Lobachevsky's relatives were, understandably, not at all happy with the implications.
It's the one occasion I can think of where I feel Tom Lehrer's satire was truly misdirected. One of many reasons I appreciate him so much is otherwise that when the sharp wit was at someone's expense, they had earned it (and this in contrast to the practice with most contemporary purported comedians, at least in my country).
I think Lehrer was counting on both the Danny Kaye reference and his prosody statement to hint at where this song stands with respect to Poe's Law:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24281288
I occupy an interesting intersection in that I went to school for math and science (BS in CS, did math and computational chemistry research) and I also used to play and sing in a piano bar (often in the same night!)
Every once in a while I'd pull out a Tom Lehrer tune, but you really need the right audience for it.
Fun fact: Tom Lehrer and Steven Sondheim were childhood friends.
yes, I took "Nature of Math". Wonderful course and his delivery was excellent. I almost ended up being the TA the next quarter. It was my introduction to many things, including birthday paradox and analytic solutions for tertiary equations.
Lehrer's technique here was a common Cold War trope: one daren't mention any second-world achievements directly in english works, but cloaked in enough pejoratives they'd slip past the censorship of the crowd, while people who could evaluate for themselves did.
Last week there was that opponent of Putin who got poisoned and was sent to a hospital in Omsk and I was like: "Why do I know the name of that random Russian city ?".
Omsk is one of the largest cities in Siberia, and apparently 7th largest in all of Russia. Tomsk is the small city in that song, as it was bypassed by the Trans-Siberian Railway in favor of Novosibirsk.
I found three albums of his - "That was the year that was", "An evening wasted with Tom Lehrer" and "Antoher evening wasted". They cover the more famous parts of his repertoire, and for the rest you'll likely have to look through YouTube and the internet.
Highly recommended.