Love it when I get the chance to evangelise about #TomLehrer, and I did so for Global Comment 🎶
#tomlehrer
Tom Lehrer's "I Got It From Agnes" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6qFG0uop9k) is the 1960s version of TISM's "I Rooted a Girl Who Rooted a Guy Who Rooted Shane Crawford" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IXyDhR5xxQ)
#TomLehrer #TISM
This almost 60-year-old song from Tom Lehrer is feeling very relevant these days.
Fight fiercely, Harvard,
Fight, fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/1-01_Fight_Fiercely%2C_Harvard.mp3
Lyrics & music: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Songs_and_Lyrics_(Lehrer)/Fight_Fiercely,_Harvard
#Harvard #Resist #lawsuit #USpol #MApoli #CambridgeMA #TomLehrer
I’m a Yalie, but “Fight Fiercely Harvard” pace #tomlehrer
The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional
rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the
federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement
in principle.
This song has just become newly relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27PSHASlGUU #HarvardUniversity #fightfiercelyharvard #TomLehrer
@AIF_Massachusetts @heidilifeldman Fight Fiercely, Harvard! #TomLehrer
"How did smut get so dirty? Simple: It was never clean." But did you know that its filth was originally botanical?
New on the Strong Language blog, @Fritinancy pays tribute to smut and the Tom Lehrer song of that title, now 60 years old: https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/smut/
#TomLehrer #music #etymology #smut #PopCulture #songs #StrongLanguage
#OnThisDay in 1928, #TomLehrer, American musician ("The Elements"), satirist (That Was The Week That Was), and mathematician, born in New York City. ❤️🫂🌍👑🤌🏻🥹
#HappyBirthday #97
Ev'rybody say his own Kyrie Eleison: Happy 97th birthday to Tom Lehrer, the greatest musical satirist of the 20th Century. #Comedy #Humor #Humour #Music #Satire #TomLehrer #Religion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5kBDt6G_h4
On the 60th anniversary of Tom Lehrer’s song "Smut", @Fritinancy offers a salute to Lehrer and to "a four-letter word that wasn't quite one of *those* four-letter words".
On the Strong Language blog:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/smut/
#TomLehrer #music #etymology #smut #PopCulture #songs #StrongLanguage
“Smut”
“Some people have a way with words,” the comedian Steve Martin used to say, “and other people . . . uh, not have way.” Tom Lehrer very much have way. The American musician, mathematician, and songwriter, who turns 97 today, is the creator of nearly 100 satirical songs, almost all of them written in the 1950s and 1960s, whose popularity, as a Wikipedia entry puts it, “has far outlasted their topical subjects and references.” The canon includes “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” — one of Lehrer’s earliest compositions, written when he was an undergraduate at that institution — and “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” a hymn to nuclear Armageddon. (“There will be no more misery/When the world is our rotizerie.”)
The anthem nearest to our hearts here at Strong Language Central, though, is of course “Smut,” which like Lehrer himself is celebrating a significant anniversary this year. Although the lyrics reflected a set of social and legal circumstances specific to mid-1960s America, their sentiment has proved to be timeless. In honor of its 60th anniversary and Tom Lehrer’s long, remarkable life, here’s our salute to “Smut.”
Born in New York City in 1928, Tom Lehrer studied piano as a child and entered Harvard College at 15, where he studied mathematics while writing comic songs on the side. (Another accomplishment: He claimed that during his Army service, several years later, he invented the Jello shot to circumvent a ban on alcoholic beverages.) He pursued a PhD in mathematics for more than a decade, finally giving up on his dissertation in 1965; that didn’t prevent him from being hired in 1972 to teach an undergraduate math course to humanities majors, as well as a musical theater class, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His last public performance of his songs, after an 18-year hiatus, was in 1998.
By then Lehrer had been out of the songwriting business for a quarter century. But what a run he had before his retirement — and what an afterlife his songs have enjoyed, with little effort on his part. “My songs spread slowly, like herpes, rather than Ebola,” he later reflected.
Lehrer wrote “Smut” in 1965 for the satirical television revue “That Was the Week That Was” (“TW3”), the American spinoff of the BBC news program of the same name. (Only 50 of the American episodes aired, but not because of a talent shortage: Besides Lehrer, writers included Gloria Steinem and Calvin Trillin; guests included Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Buck Henry, and Alan Alda.) “Smut” was on the show because smut was in the news: The previous year, in Jacobellis v. Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled, 6-3, that Louis Malle’s film The Lovers (Les Amants) was not obscene and that the state of Ohio could not ban its showing. The most famous opinion in Jacobellis was Justice Potter Stewart’s concurrence: He wrote that the U.S. Constitution protected all obscenity except “hard-core pornography,” a category he declined to define. But, he memorably added, “I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
Jacobellis superseded a 1957 Supreme Court case, Roth v. United States, which had also contained language that quickly entered the culture at large — including “hard-core” as a modifier for “pornography.” (The OED’s earliest source for this sense of “hard-core” is the U.S. Solicitor General’s brief in Roth.) In its opinion, the Court created a test to determine what constitutes obscene material: whether the “average person,” applying contemporary community standards, would find that the material appeals to “a prurient interest” in sex, and whether the material was “utterly without redeeming social value.”
The word smut was nowhere to be found in either of these opinions. But it was Lehrer’s obvious choice for a title and lyrics: a four-letter word that wasn’t quite one of those four-letter words; short, punchy, and eminently rhymable. Lehrer employed it to impish effect while juxtaposing it with some of the Court’s high-minded language.
“I would like to say a few words about pornography,” he would begin his performance of the song. “Or as we call it in the United States, smut.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taui8bOM4_c
In 2022 Lehrer released all his lyrics into the public domain. Here are some of the choicest from “Smut”:
Smut!
Give me smut and nothing but!
A dirty novel I can’t shut
If it’s uncut
And unsubt-le
I’ve never quibbled
If it was ribald.
I would devour
Where others merely nibbled.
As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
“To be smut
It must be ut-
Terly without redeeming social importance.”
Por
Nographic pictures I adore
Indecent magazines galore
I like them more
If they’re hardcore
Quibbled/ribald/nibbled? Well played, sir.
Lehrer concludes with:
In other words: Smut! I love it
Ah, the adventures of a slut
Oh, I’m a market they can’t glut
I don’t know what
Compares with smut
Hip, hip, hooray!
Let’s hear it for the Supreme Court!
Don’t let them take it away!
How did smut get so dirty?
Simple: It was never clean.
Like slut, to which it is unrelated, smut – a cognate of German and Yiddish schmutz – is a filthy word, although the filth was originally botanical. When the word first appeared in print in 1665 it signified “a fungus disease affecting various plants, especially cereals.” (If you’ve eaten huitlacoche in Mexico, or in a Mexican restaurant, you’ve eaten corn smut. It’s considered a delicacy, and I can confirm that it’s tasty, belying the word’s literal translation from Nahuatl: “sleeping excrescence.”)
By the end of the 17th century smut could mean not only dirty grain but also dirty words. Green’s Dictionary of Slang dates the earliest usage of pornographic “smut” to 1698, in Jeremy Collier’s Profanesse [profaneness] and Immorality of the English Stage Together with the Sense of Antiquity upon This Argument. “When he has larded his Scenes with Smut, and play’d his jests on Religion […],” Collier tut-tutted, “what can a dry line or two of good Counsel signify?” The OED, which defines smut as “indecent or obscene language,” cites Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1762): “The gentlemen talked smut, the ladies laughed, and were angry.”
Smut (2009), by Jonathon Green, author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang. The back cover reads: “Warning! This Book Is Not for the Easily Offended.”
“Smut” may strike 21st-century ears as quaint, but the word is far from obsolete. If anything, it’s enjoying a bit of a resurgence. In 2012, for example, the English playwright and author Alan Bennett published two short stories under the umbrella title Smut: Two Unseemly Stories; The Guardian’s reviewer observed that although the writing was “incredibly sharp,” any smut therein “was unlikely to shock.” A Paris Review interviewer brought up the title: “[It] is a very English word, and something I associate more with the North of England, where you are from.” Bennett’s reply: “It’s a genteel way of saying filth, really, isn’t it?”
Recent years have seen the rise of the “faerie smut” and “dragon smut” genres of erotic “romantasy” literature; the “Reading Smut” podcast, “dedicated to all books romantic, erotic, and deliciously spicy,” launched in February 2025. Sydney Brianna, a writer in Spring, Texas, self-publishes under the Smut Dungeon Press imprint and plans to launch The Time When Smut Saved the Universe in 2026. (Tagline: “Even aliens like smut.”)
Not everyone is enthralled: In October 2024 Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook and podcast company, aroused some listeners — and not in a fun way — when it responded to a request for sex-free romance titles with a three-word smackdown: “Embrace. The. Smut.”
Sixty years after Tom Lehrer chortled over “novels that pander/to my taste for candor,” smut can still sound . . . well, smutty. And thank fuck for that. Lehrer’s cheery lyrics are a bracing antidote to our depressing neo-bluenose era of censorship and book bans. Let’s all sing a chorus of “Smut” in honor of Tom Lehrer’s 97th trip around the sun:
Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I’ve got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley
But now they’re trying to take it all away from us unless
We take a stand, and hand in hand we fight for freedom of the press.
Before I invest time making a #TomLehrer quotes #bot, is anyone on fedi aware of one?
I haven't found it yet but some gems are hidden đź‘€
@Soozcat @georgetakei Related tangent: a few years ago Tom Lehrer ("The Elements", "The Vatican Rag", "A Christmas Carol", "Lobachevsky", "We Will All Go Together When We Go", "Pollution", "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", "The Masochism Tango", etc.) put all his music and lyrics in the public domain.
I always like to end on a positive, uplifting note, so here is a rousing, uplifting song which is guaranteed to cheer you up.
Spring is in full swing, lifting my spirits for pitch-black humour. Before you misunderstand me for allegedly promoting animal cruelty, let me assure you that I checked: "It's not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon!" (You might also want to check the works of the marvellous #TomLehrer.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY
The Element Song, by Tom Lehrer. This is probably the world's least sing-alongable song ever, but it fits perfectly for tonight's theme!
Things I'm grateful for: Tom Lehrer is still alive (he will turn 97 in April), AND musicians at the Tufts music dept are performing a free Lehrer tribute concert this afternoon.
[LIVE STREAMED] Sunday Concert Series: Not Dead Yet!!
Sunday, February 23, 2025, 3-5pmProf. Paul Lehrman (no relation) grudgingly presents a concert tribute to the legendary Tom Lehrer with Thomas Stumpf, piano. An afternoon to be wasted with the words and music (?) of the great American satirical songwriter of the 1950s and '60s Tom Lehrer.
Location: Fisher Performance Room, Granoff Music Center
Campus: Medford/Somerville campus
Open to Public: Yes
#thingsToBeGratefulFor #music #folkmusic #TomLehrer #CambervilleMA #MedfordMA #SomervilleMA
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