In memory of Beatrice Janow
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“The potentate of totin’ freight.”
Advertising slogan for HERNIA MOVERS
When a HERNIA MOVERS van comes down the street I wonder at the brilliance of the company's logo and then think about Tom Lehrer. He would have approved of the slogan’s internal rhythms and might have wished he had composed it himself. It’s that good.
He died last week at a venerable age. His work has long intersected with the twists, churns and dyspeptic path of my own life adventures. This aleatoric itinerary started early. My hyper-intellectual parents were waiting for someone like Lehrer to show up. When he did, they embraced him closely like a Pentecostal in Tulsa would hug a repentant Jimmy Swaggart. Before Lehrer’s arrival, when it occurred to them that it was time to ascend out of their chronic depressions and sample a dose of levity, they avoided the mainstream funny guys on television. Instead they went to printed media; the cartoons in the New Yorker, the essays of S. J. Perelman, and the joke section of The Reconstructionist Magazine. For them, it was fine to laugh occasionally so long as they got chuckles through subscriptions to distant coastal journals or from a book. Occasionally, when times were particularly gloomy and their Miltowns and other meds had lost efficacy, the tragic couple would even resort to browsing through the salacious “personals” in the New York Review of Books. Always good, if not for a laugh, at least for a diversion from melancholy.
But what about Jack Benny and his orbit? The stars of that constellation were not discoverable above our house. The idea of watching his television show was an anathema to my parents. His work didn’t rise even to mid-moustache. It was low-brow. It wasn’t done. And the same went for “You Bet Your Life.” In the piano sphere it was Dinu Lipati they went for. Not Liberace. With Lehrer they made up for lost time. Now they could invite their fellow-congregants from the long-belly-upped Congregation Micah on Monaco Boulevard over for cocktails, fire up the mighty McIntosh stereo until it glowed like a menorah on the eighth night, spin “That was the Year that Was” and suppress the resultant belly laughs. Restrained chuckles, if the sound didn't exceed 60 decibels, were permitted.
For me, the problem with this comedic landscape was not that Tom got the gig at our place. The frustration was that he didn’t share the venue with other luminaries. Hiring Lehrer was a good choice. It was the exclusion of Uncle Miltie and Groucho that created a significant lacuna in my small world. It was undeniable that Lehrer was an edifying hoot. He helped educate me and made my world bigger. The guy possessed a highly-polished wit that I envied and tried to emulate. Even as a pubescent pre-viola player (you haven’t lived until you become a pre-pubescent viola player), Lehrer’s inimitableness was obvious. His patter was funny as hell, he was smarter than hell, he could rhyme better than hell, and played the piano better than hell.
Apparently Hell had some catching up to do.
Given the artist’s academic attainments, it was surmised that he wasn’t in it for the money. He already had a day job, and a highly respectable one at that. He donned the cloak of a smart-ass amateur chanteur not with pride but with a becoming modesty adorned with the tracings of slight embarrassment. This dilettantism was a point in his favor. To make cash out of bon mots as your prime motivation would be crude. He had a higher shtick than to merely entertain. His goal was not to make his fans only laugh. His project was to make them smile vaguely from their high perches, look down, and reflect on the mid-century reality that things, both culturally and geo-politically, sure were fucked up. He had exchanged his classroom at MIT and its equation-bedecked blackboard for a piano and the stage at The Hungry I in San Francisco. He had made the trip from Cambridge to the West Coast and Copenhagen to became a Baal Shem Tov to secularists. But that trade couldn't change one fundamental aspect of his identity. The demographic make-up of his audience had changed, but his role in relation to his public was the same. He was still a teacher. His motivation was to teach. Anyone who learned the list of Elements from Lehrer's song on the subject was a beneficiary of his pedagogical virtuosity.
Another point in his favor was that Lehrer was seemingly not in the comedy game for the money. He didn’t specialise in jokes about “the wife.” Such gags were would appeal to a bigger audience and bring in more dough. His routine concerned nukes and Nazi rocket-scientists. That Lehrer could pull that off was almost a miracle. But he did. That was a remarkable achievement.
What I didn’t tell my parents (who wants to be taken out of the will?) was that beyond Lehrer there was a congregation of comedians that also engaged me. I thought Buddy Hackett was hilarious. But I had to leave home to hear those exiles. Fortunately, I didn’t need to go far. My grandmother lived a few blocks away across Cheeseman Park. She loved Milton Berle. She adored Groucho.
So the two of us would watch what I could not watch at home and laughed our respective tuchuses off. I might have learned about Alma and Gustav from Tom Lehrer, but I learned other more important stuff from the low-brows. I learned more about timing from Jack Benny than I did from all my viola teachers combined. He taught me about silence. As for my Grandmother, they were more than funny fellows. They were role-models that she hoped her wayward grandson would emulate. They played Vegas and made good livings. For that they were more than successful entertainers. They were inspirations.
Tom Lehrer’s death makes for a good time to honor him. He was incomparable as a miniaturist. He could pack more cynicism into two minutes than Roger Bannister could pack strides into a mile. Despite this, my parents were wrong not to let Lehrher’s funny contemporaries in. My grandmother was right. Jack Benny was deserving. He didn’t deal in brows at any level. With that tiny chandelier on his violin as he schmoozed with Liberace he was able to light up the world. He was my Tzadik. This was handy as the disreputable Rabbis (even lower than disreputable) at Congregation Micah didn’t quite make the cut. Lehrer’s memorable achievement was in the realm of pedagogy. That is a good realm to be in.
He illuminated my living room on Humboldt Street. It needed it. I thank him for that. Jack played with the stars. Plus he made a good living.
May their jesting be a blessing.
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That kind of highbrowness didn't live in my family, but we did love to laugh!
Nice work, photo and words