Word: lehrer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Threatening Sanity. Short of Bruce's extremes are a host of other comedians displaying varying degrees of sickness or satire. Among them: ¶ Tom Lehrer, 31, onetime Harvard mathematics instructor and still the college boy's delight. Lehrer is that rare amateur who turned professional and who did so successfully; in his last engagement he threatened the sanity of S.R.O. crowds at London's Royal Festival Hall. Sample Lehrer lyric...
...know where people get this idea I'm so sinister," says Lehrer. "They have this idea I'm a lot older than I am--that could be the record jacket, of course--or 'He's not at all the way he sounds.' It's not that I'm that raffish. Perfectly nice people joke this...
...Lehrer's "career" branched out from a pleasant habit of writing songs for people. 'In the old days," when it was for a roommate or a guy at dinner, I'd write hundreds of songs," Lehrer says. "Now that it's my living, I've stopped doing it. Then, if it was a lousy song, nobody cared. But when I started singing for money, it was a matter of deleting songs rather than adding them. I only write songs I can use professionally now, the other ideas are generally too personal or too offensive to use on the stage...
...Lehrer has his relations with his audience pretty well figure dout. "I don't feel the 'waves of love' they tell you an entertainer is supposed to feel. The hardest thing is to make it look as if you're enjoying it," he says. "It's so mechanical now, I find my mind wanders and I get lost in the middle of a song...
...make it a rule not to sing my own songs at parties any more," Lehrer said, a little ruefully. "The party turns into a request session and it's no fun for me. It's my business now and I don't like to be asked to work in my spare time. It's like inviting a plumber to dinner and then asking him to fix the john before he leaves...