When “Tomfoolery” played at the Village Gate in New York in 1981, Mr. Lehrer explained to The Times why he had stopped writing. “The Vietnam War is what changed it,” he said. “Everybody got earnest. My purpose was to make people laugh and not applaud. If the audience applauds, they’re just showing they agree with me.” On another occasion he famously offered another explanation: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”Riling the audience up for applause might have been how Stephen Colbert ultimately went wrong. But them, Mr Lehrer faced the same quandary. "'I used to laugh more. Now I get angry,' he told NPR in 1997. 'And it's very hard to be satiric and — or to be funny, let's say — and angry at the same time.'"
Well, yes. I credit Mr Lehrer with the ability to mock the sort of Excessively Earnest People who never learned how not to be stupid about being smart. And yet he also had the ability to make such people comfortable with their prejudices. "Once upon a time, the likes of Tom Lehrer and the coastal cosmopolitans could get away with that sort of mockery, as their advocacy of the end of Jim Crow was a cause almost everyone accepted, although whether its end justified the massive expansion of federal powers or the extension of notions of social justice to abortion or the sexual underground remains subject to debate."
Mr Lehrer understood at some level the limits to mocking Normals. "It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on. The nicest thing about a protest song is that it makes you feel so good." Public life is the worse for those who have followed him losing sight of that wisdom. R.I.P.
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