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I don’t remember exactly how I first encountered the music of Tom Lehrer, the satirical singer, songwriter, pianist, and mathematician who died in Cambridge on Saturday at age 97. But I do know when it happened: high school.

It might’ve been reading “Oedipus Rex” for English class and stumbling on Lehrer’s irreverent parody of the Greek tragedy, set to an overly peppy ragtime (“He loved his mother and she loved him, and yet his story is rather grim,” Lehrer sings). It could’ve been the sophomore chemistry teacher who raved about “The Elements,” which consists of Lehrer rattling through the periodic table in just a few breaths. Or maybe it was the impish debate coach who delighted in Lehrer’s rhapsodic roast of Wernher von Braun, the Nazi scientist turned NASA rocket engineer.

There wouldn’t seem to be much to connect a 21st-century kid with a Harvard-educated math prodigy who rose to fame in the 1950s with short, rhymey ditties set to cheerful tunes that skewered midcentury America, geopolitics, and cultural mores. But one way or another, I was hooked.

Lehrer’s music was everything my nerdy teenage self craved. As a lapsed piano student, I appreciated seeing him turn what I’d treated as a chore into a vehicle for social commentary. As a history obsessive, Lehrer’s dark parodies of the issues of his day — from nuclear holocaust and racism to religion and American military interventionism abroad (“when in doubt, send the Marines,” one song goes) — both educated and entertained. The moral clarity of his humor appealed to me, too, as moral clarity often does to self-righteous young people. I remember queuing up songs with friends at the cafeteria lunch table, all of us delighting in the absurdity.

Lehrer was also transgressive, wielding black humor against taboo subjects like masochism and pornography. Some songs twist an innocent-sounding premise into satire; “My Home Town” waxes nostalgic about those “super-special just plain folks” before blithely describing a succession of sadists. Lehrer’s deft wordplay and playful keystrokes belie the cut of his wit, a knife in the back rather than a frontal assault.

Others spotted Lehrer’s youthful appeal long before I did. He matriculated to Harvard at 15 and got his start performing for free around Cambridge. As his repertoire expanded, his schoolboy affect became an asset. “I could get away with that stuff because I was this clean-cut college kid in a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses,” he told the Globe decades later. Lehrer’s first album debuted in 1953; others followed into the mid-1960s. Some songs, like those he later wrote for the PBS children’s show “The Electric Company,” explicitly courted younger listeners.

But if you’re long out of primary school and still unfamiliar with Lehrer, never fear. Decades later, his satire still zings. As fears grow that Iran and other countries will rush to build nuclear weapons, Lehrer’s 1965 “Who’s Next,” which imagined Luxembourg and the state of Alabama joining the atomic arms race, remains relevant. “Pollution,” from the same album, skewered American cities’ preponderance of smog (“just go out for a breath of air and you’ll be ready for Medicare”), but still hits in an era of climate change.

And at a time when political satirists are at risk of losing their jobs, it’s helpful to remember that they’ve rarely been entirely welcome. After one 1959 concert in Cambridge, the Globe termed Lehrer “the poison Ivy League shape of the Devil” (and that was a positive review, going on to praise him as “a brilliant and coruscating parodist”). Others seem to agree that Lehrer can still capture a modern audience. GBH was airing recordings of his performances as recently as last October.

So what’s the best way to experience Lehrer today? I maintain it’s the black-and-white video recordings of his performances from the 1960s. Lehrer released his music into the public domain in 2020, and clips are widely available on YouTube; I’ve linked to many above.

Watching lets you appreciate Lehrer’s smooth finger work and comedic timing, the arched eyebrow or guileless grin as he croons out a particularly savage line. Lehrer banters with the audience as he tees up each new song. And the recordings capture listeners’ reactions, a hint of how subversive some of his lyrics were at the time. Midway through a 1967 rendition of “Wernher von Braun,” as Lehrer affects a German accent to mock the onetime Nazi’s disregard for civilian life, you can hear a man let out something between a guffaw and a gasp.

There’s a practical reason to focus on those older clips, too: few others exist. Lehrer largely stopped playing publicly in the 1970s and went back to teaching college math, splitting time between Cambridge and California. Although album sales brought in money, he took an almost dilettantish approach to his musical career and later expressed surprise that his work had endured. As Globe critic Don Aucoin observes, “You always got the sense that Lehrer was primarily interested in amusing himself.” Thankfully, he let us in on the joke.

🧩 4 Down: Actor Goldblum | 🔥 97° A scorcher

Mass. and Cass: Frustration over public drug use and dealing is mounting among Bostonians who live near the intersection, four years after Mayor Michelle Wu vowed to address the problem.

Broiling: As a heat wave continues to bake New England, these maps show just how hot it will get. And here’s when temperatures in Boston will peak today.

Sports betting: A federal lawsuit accuses DraftKings, the Boston-based online gambling company, of using misleading ads to entice people to make large bets, fueling gambling addiction.

Good team: The partnership between Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital is ending soon, but for now they’re the country’s third-best program for cancer care, per a new ranking.

Karen Read fallout: Read asked a judge to order her SUV and cellphone returned, which the authorities seized during the case. Separately, a judge restricted access to phone data belonging to Michael Proctor, the fired Massachusetts state trooper who investigated Read, in another case Proctor worked.

Planned Parenthood: The health care clinics in Massachusetts can keep collecting reimbursements from Medicaid after a judge temporarily blocked a GOP-passed law that cuts off payments to clinics offering abortion services.

Housing costs: Two US senators — Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts progressive, and Tim Scott, a Trump ally from South Carolina — are spearheading a bill to expand housing supply and lower prices.

Jeffrey Epstein: Trump said he barred the sex offender from Mar-a-Lago years ago after Epstein poached workers from him, contradicting his administration’s claims that he kicked out Epstein “for being a creep.” (USA Today)

AI election: Will the 2026 midterms be the first in which content generated by artificial intelligence become inescapable?

Speaking of: Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s Democratic former governor, is running for US Senate next year. But the party still faces long odds to win control of the chamber.

By Teresa Hanafin

💍 The Big Day: After a decade of planning for the future, these Boston newlyweds had a multi-day destination wedding in Portugal — and went all out.

🛶 The Big Diss: The formerly popular Lonely Planet travel guide has a list of the 11 best US lakes to spend a vacation, and I guess the geographically challenged writers never visited Maine’s sublime lakes. Never mind Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg in Webster, Mass. Sheesh. (Lonely Planet)

🫂 Good PR: When your married CEO and married HR chief (not to each other) are caught snuggling on a Coldplay cam, what do you do? Hire Gwyneth Paltrow, former wife of the band’s frontman, to change the conversation. (@astronomerio on X)

🎞️ Back to the past: How well do you know 40-year-old “Back to the Future”? Take film critic Odie Henderson’s quiz to find out.

⚾️ Move over, Labubu: Many MLB teams give away player bobbleheads during the season. Now they’re coveted sports memorabilia, with some reselling for hundreds of dollars. Plus there’s a Bobblehead Hall of Fame? (Axios)

⛺️ Love Island? Be among the first modern-day pioneers to camp overnight on Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor this Saturday night. Well, officially anyway. (Boston Harbor Now)

📚 Super reader: Dan Pelzer started keeping a list of the books he read in 1962 while in the Peace Corps. He stopped in 2023 when his eyesight failed. His total: 3,599. After his death on July 1, his family shared his list with the world. (NYT 🎁)

Thanks for reading Starting Point.

This newsletter was edited by Teresa Hanafin.

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