⚠️ SNARKY DISCLAIMER

 This is satire. A eulogy with bite. A tribute soaked in sarcasm, soaked again in reverence, and air-dried with the tears of a thousand canceled comedians. No actual pigeons were poisoned during the creation of this obituary. We miss you already, Tom. Thanks for making rage sound like show tunes.

Tom Lehrer is dead.

And now the rest of us are stuck here, trying to laugh our way through the apocalypse without the man who turned nuclear annihilation into a jaunty piano ballad.

He died at 97—because of course he did. Lehrer was the kind of man who could outlive presidents, popes, and the entire dignity of Western civilization. He watched the Cold War come and go, and somehow managed to stay alive long enough to watch the sequel get rebooted in hi-def with worse dialogue.

And yet, through it all, he never stopped being the sharpest knife in the drawer. A Harvard-trained mathematician who chose to spend his prime years writing songs about venereal disease, murder, pollution, and the Catholic Church—all while playing in a style so charming it made the poison go down like it was poured over ice cream.

He didn’t chase celebrity. He ducked it. After releasing barely 30 songs—songs that dissected society with surgical precision and absolute deadpan glee—he just walked away. No victory tour. No farewell album. He disappeared back into academia like a glorious middle finger in the wind.

Tom Lehrer didn’t need your applause. He didn’t want your fandom. He wanted to remind you—gently, musically—that you are probably the problem.

He gave us songs like “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Vatican Rag,” and “We Will All Go Together When We Go”—and they weren’t just funny. They were warnings. He weaponized melody. He smuggled truth into waltzes. He set fire to hypocrisy and made it rhyme.

And now, in the age of social media outrage and algorithm-fed idiocy, we’ve finally arrived in the world Lehrer warned us about. But we’re too busy arguing over emojis and podcast guests to realize it.

He called it. He always called it.

And what did he do at the end of his life? He dropped every song into the public domain, told the lawyers to piss off, and said, in so many words:

"Here, take the tools. Do something useful before it’s too late."

Spoiler: it might already be too late.

Tom Lehrer is gone. And with him, the last ounce of class in American satire may have gone too. He never screamed. He never whined. He just played the piano and held up a mirror so polished, it made the rest of us look like cartoons.

FINAL THOUGHT?

In a world where satire is now just rage bait and TikTok trends, Tom Lehrer was a goddamn lighthouse.

And now the light’s gone out.

Goodnight, Tom.

Thanks for the laugh.

And the warning.

We ignored both.

(To the tune and structure of “We Will All Go Together When We Go”)

When you read a little headline

That I’ve died and slipped the deadline,

And the obits find some clever things to say—

If they praise my moral daring,

Or my gift for public swearing,

You can bet I wouldn’t want it any way.

But don’t feel sorry.

No more critics left to mock me,

No more folks who tried to block me,

No more people wondering where I’d been.

For when Death at last unfurled

His clipboard at my end-of-world—

I just raised one brow and turned to him with a grin:

🎶 And we will all hum together when I’m gone,

What a tuneful event to ponder on!

There’ll be no more suppression

Of satirical expression—

Yes, we all will hum together when I’m gone.

We will all hum together when I’m gone,

Like a mid-century black-and-white salon.

With the angels in suspenders

And some demons as bartenders—

What a lovely little lounge to linger on!

Oh, we will all toast together when I toast,

And I’ll roast myself before they roast.

There will be no holy mystery,

Just a cocktail and some history,

And a smoking jacket haunting like a ghost.

Down in the red mezzanine,

Where the jazz is warm and clean...

🎶 We will all smirk together when I’m missed,

There’ll be no need for someone to insist

That I earn some posthumation

Through a tearful dedication—

Just a well-placed rimshot in the mist.

Oh, we will all wink together when we wink,

Not a soul will be left out of the drink.

When St. Peter checks his planner,

He’ll just nod and raise a banner:

“Let him through—he’s got better jokes than we think.”

🎶 And we will all hum together when I’m gone—

All the verses, right and cleverly wrong.

With no heavenly probation,

Just full comic detonation—

Yes, we all will hum together,

When I fall off stage forever—

Yes, we all will hum together when I’m gone.

(Spoken, bone-dry):

 “And now that I’ve left the building—remember to tip your existential dread.”