Tom Lehrer: The Next Generation

[calimac]

It's often been observed that Weird Al Yankovic is the Allan Sherman of his day, and I endorse that view (and would more enthusiastically were Weird Al more likely to parody songs I know, or which at least have an actual tune).

But what I hadn't seen was a successor to Tom Lehrer, the other humorous songsmith who was a star of my youth. Lehrer's distinctive characteristic, besides the fact that he almost always wrote his own tunes (rather than making parodies) and accompanied himself on the piano, was his utterly black sense of humor. He would take politically touchy or downright gruesome topics and treat them with light and fetching wit. Songs like "We Will All Go Together When We Go" (cheerfully mulling the prospect of World War III) or "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" (self-explanatory) disgusted some people, but if you accepted Lehrer's sense of comedy they were hilarious.

Recently I had call to link to a video of Lehrer's "National Brotherhood Week" (wading boldly into a politically sensitive realm) and noticed in the YouTube comments several remarks to the effect that this was like Bo Burnham.

So who is Bo Burnham? Besides being the writer/director of the recent movie Eighth Grade (painfully realistic, and not as funny as it thinks it is), he's a stand-up comic whose specialty is ... writing his own songs, both words and melody, and accompanying himself on the keyboard. And doing so with a Tom Lehrer-like dark sense of humor.

I found that I only liked about half of the Bo Burnham songs I listened to online, which is a low percentage by Lehrer standards, but some of them were good, and the absolute winner was this one. Warning: if you do not like Tom Lehrer, do not listen to this song. You'll be horribly offended. (It's also more misogynist than the author probably realizes.) But the resemblance, not in style but in aesthetic approach, to Lehrer's most evil-minded moods is uncanny.

The title of that one would give it away, but I also enjoyed listening to "Lower Your Expectations," "From God's Perspective," and his parody of glossy commercial country music, "Pandering." He's been around for a bit but hadn't come to my attention.

Comments

[nancylebov]

Bo Burnham is clever, but he's too much about psychology to be Tom Lehrer.

[calimac]

As I said, it's an uncanny similarity in aesthetic approach that struck me. Not style. If Lehrer were minded to take up this kind of theme, he wouldn't write these songs, but they would come across exactly this way.

[(Anonymous)]

Have you encountered Tim Minchin, yet? His sense of humor is not as black as Lehrer's, but I like him a lot, and he is both funny and ... kind isn't quite the right word, nor is humane, but his humor is not cruel, and his world view is one that I enjoy. There's a 10 minute beat poem called "Storm" which is a paen to science, and there's a love song which encapsulates my very non-romantic ideas about love. He plays the piano, writes his own music, and is very talented.

[sturgeonslawyer]

Thank you for this. I've been needing something funny lately.

[pink_halen]

You may like Stephen Lynch. He is as caustic as Bo.

Damn that's an Ugly Baby
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3zpT502CEs

Lullaby
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGfx7hFBhhs

[wild_patience]

I stopped listening, offended by his wandering pitch. It threw me out of the song.