[ExI] Tom Lehrer profile

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark
.

<http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/tom-lehrer>
Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius

 

My favorite Tom Lehrer  is "The Vatican Rag":   


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f72CTDe4-0
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f72CTDe4-0&feature=kp> &feature=kp

And "The Elements":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM-wSKFBpo

  John K Clark

 

 

 

Clearly Lehrer had talent.  How can a father explain to anyone born in this
millennium 70s geek humor?

 

Fun aside for you who know what I am talking about with that comment.  In
the mid 1990s, I was looking to buy a rebuilt engine for my truck.  I was on
the phone to a local shop and the guy made a Doctor Demento reference.  I
was able to finish the sentence in unison with him and recite the next line.
Immediately we started talking about those things only geeks would know.  I
realized his voice sounded a bit familiar, so then he started into some of
the songs: he was a regular on Dr. Demento back in the 1970s when it was a
live radio show in the Los Angeles area.  He wrote some of the songs.
Needless to say, he got the job on my truck.

 

Back then, that kind of humor had no commercial value: Weird Al Yankovic was
the first one to really make it big from that era with that genre.  So he
and the others who were creating Demento-ish content never treated it as a
job, just some offbeat hobby they were doing.  So the guy learned auto
mechanics and ended up owning a shop in Sunnyvale California twenty years
after being a star on Doctor Demento.  He was telling the truth: when I went
to his shop he had a bunch of pictures on the wall of him and Weird Al
together as teenagers on the Dr. Demento show.  Of course when he even
uttered the name Weird Al Yankovic, I removed my hat and spoke in low
reverent tones.

 

He told me something I didn't know: Weird Al is a monster brain.  The guy
with the auto shop was a couple years older, but they graduated high school
together.  He said Al Yankovic was the smartest guy he ever met, utterly
without exception.  Now is that cool or what?  

 

Now how to I explain that to a seven year old?  Do I even bother trying?

 

spike






 

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