Tom Lehrer все тексты (слова) песен, переводы, видео, клипы

Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly,
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don't say "when."
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens,
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read. It was that of a lady named Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, who had, in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in central Europe. And, among these lovers, who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which is what made it so interesting, there were three whom she went so far as to marry: One of the leading composers of the day, Gustav Mahler, composer of "Das Lied von der Erde" and other light classics, one of the leading architects, Walter Gropius, of the "Bauhaus School of Design", and one of the leading writers, Franz Werfel, author of the "Song of Bernadette" and other masterpieces.

It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years!

It seemed to me, on reading this obituary, that the story of Alma was the stuff of which ballads should be made, so here is one:

The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well

You know: of all the songs I've ever sung, that is the one I've had the most requests not to.
I have time for one more here. This one is a little song dedicated to the Boy Scouts of America. [applause] We seem to have a convention here tonight. The Boy Scouts of America, those noble little... bastions of democracy, and the American Legion of tomorrow. Their motto is... I would like to state at this time that I am not now and have never been... a member of the Boy Scouts of America. Their motto is, as you know, Be Prepared! and that is the name of this song.

Be prepared! That's the Boy Scout's marching song,
Be prepared! As through life you march along.
Be prepared to hold your liquor pretty well,
Don't write naughty words on walls if you can't spell.

Thank you, for my first encore I'd like to turn to a type of song that people like myself find ourselves subjected to with increasing frequency as time goes on, and that is the college alma mater. You'll find yourself at a reunion of grads, and old undergrads, and eh... somebody will start proking out one of these things and everyone will gradually join in. Each in his own key, of course. Until the place is just soggy with nostalgia. Well, a typical such song might be called Bright College Days, and might go like this.

Bright college days, oh, carefree days that fly,
To thee we sing with our glasses raised on high.
Let's drink a toast as each of us recalls
Ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls.

Turn on the spigot,

I should like to consider the folk song, and expand briefly on a theory I have held for some time, to the effect that the reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the
Le. if professional songwriters had written them instead, things might have turned out considerably differently. for example, consider the old favorite, with which, I'm sure, you're all familiar
Ot;clementine", you know:

In a cavern, in a canyon,
Dadada dadadada...
A song with no recognizable merit what'soever, and imagine what might have happened if, for example, cole porter had tried writing this song. the first verse might have come out like this:

Now we come to that peculiar bit of Americana known as the football fight song. I was reminded not too long ago, upon returning from my lesson with the Scrabble pro at the Harvard club in Boston, of the days of my undergraduacy long ago when there used to be these very long Saturday afternoons in the fall with nothing to do - the library was closed - just waiting around for the cocktail parties to begin. And on occasions like that, some of us used to wander over to the...I believe it was called the stadium, to see if anything might be going on over there. And one did come to realize that the football fight songs that one hears in comparable stadia have a tendency to be somewhat uncouth, and even violent, and that it would be refreshing, to say the least, to find one that was a bit more genteel. And here it is, dedicated to my own alma mater, and called Fight Fiercely, Harvard.

Fight fiercely, Harvard, fight, fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.

How we will celebrate our victory,

During the last election we had a good deal of fun back east following your senatorial contest out here. I'm from Massachusetts, and I feel that we have a certain right to gloat over the other states because Massachusetts is after all the only state with three senators. Anyway, here's a salute to your new junior senator:

Hollywood's often tried to mix
Show business with politics
From Helen Gahagan
To Ronald Reagan?
But Mr. Murphy is the star
Who's done the best by far.

I love my friends and they love me
We're just as close as we can be
And just because we really care
Whatever we get, we share!

I got it from Agnes
She got it from Jim
We all agree it must have been him

I hold your hand in mine, dear,
I press it to my lips.
I take a healthy bite
From your dainty fingertips.

My joy would be complete, dear,
If you were only here,
But still I keep your hand

Well, what I like to do on formal occasions like this is to take some of the various types of songs that we all know and presumably love, and, as it were, to kick them when they're down. I find that if you take the various popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything from the ridiculous to the obscene, or - as they say in New York - "sophisticated". I'd like to illustrate with several hundred examples for you this evening, first of all, the southern type song about the wonders of the American south. But it's always seemed to me that most of these songs really don't go far enough. The following song, on the other hand, goes too far. It's called I want to Go Back To Dixie.

I want to go back to Dixie,
Take me back to dear ol' Dixie,
That's the only li'l ol' place for li'l ol' me.
Old times there are not forgotten,
Whuppin' slaves and sellin' cotton,
And waitin' for the Robert E. Lee.

When it's fiesta time in Guadalajara,
Then I long to be back once again
In Old Mexico.
Where we lived for today,
Never giving a thought to tomara.
To the strumming of guitars,
In a hundred grubby bars
I would whisper "Te amo."

The heart of every man in our platoon must swell with pride,
For the nation's youth, the cream of which is marching at his side.
For the fascinating rules and regulations that we share,
And the quaint and curious costumes that we're called upon to wear.

Now Al joined up to do his part defending you and me.
He wants to fight and bleed and kill and die for liberty.
With the hell of war he's come to grips,

Who made me the genius I am today,
The mathematician that others all quote,
Who's the professor that made me that way?
The greatest that ever got chalk on his coat.

One man deserves the credit,
One man deserves the blame,
And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.

A considerable amount of commotion was stirred up during the past year over the prospect of a multi-lateral force, known to the headline writers as mlf. much of this discussion took place during
Baseball season so the chronicle may not have covered it but it did get a certain amount of publicity, and the basic idea was that a bunch of us nations, the good guys, would get together on a j
Nuclear deterrent force including our current friends, like france, and our traditional friends, like germany. here's a song about that called the mlf lullaby.

Sleep, baby, sleep, in peace may you slumber,
No danger lurks, your sleep to encumber,
We've got the missiles, peace to determine,
And one of the fingers on the button will be german.

Next we have the dear-hearts-and-gentle-people's school of songwriting, in which the singer tells you that, no matter how much sin and vice and crime go on where he comes from, it's still the be
Ace in the world because it's home, you know. sort of gets you. this example is called my home town.

I really have a yen
To go back once again,
Back to the place where no one wears a frown,
To see once more those super-special just plain folks
In my home town.

SCENE: Outside the cave of a very grouchy hermit.
CAST: The hermit (H) and a very sweet child (C).
C: Isn't it a lovely day? H: No, it isn't!
C: Could you come outside and play? H: No, I couldn't!
C: Did you ever take a hike? H: No, I didn't!
C: How'd you like to ride my bike? H: Frankly, I wouldn't!
C: Isn't, couldn't, didn't, wouldn't -- Is that all you can say?
H: Isn't, couldn't, didn't, wouldn't -- Yes, now go away!

Oh, the white folks hate the black folks,
And the black folks hate the white folks.
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule.

But during National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week,
Lena Horne and Sheriff Clarke are dancing cheek to cheek.
It's fun to eulogize

Some of you who have small children may have perhaps been put in the embarrassing position of being unable to do your child’s arithmetic homework because of the current revolution in mathematics teaching known as the new math. so as a public service here tonight I thought I would offer a brief lesson in the new math. tonight we’re going to cover subtraction. this is the first room I’ve work for a while that didn’t have a blackboard so we will have to make due with more primitive visual aids, as they say in the "ad biz." consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here: 342 - 173.

Now remember how we used to do that. three from two is nine; carry the one, and if you’re under 35 or went to a private school you say seven from three is six, but if you’re over 35 and went to public school you say eight from four is six; carry the one so we have 169, but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer. Here’s how they do it now.

You can’t take three from two,
Two is less than three,
So you look at the four in the tens place.
Now that’s really four tens,

From the Bible to the popular song,
There's one theme that we find right along.
Of all ideals they hail as good,
The most sublime is motherhood.

There was a man, oh, who it seems,
Once carried this ideal to extremes.
He loved his mother and she loved him,

@ 128 CBR
1959.03.20-21 An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer (1/11)

I'd like to take you now on wings of song, as it were, and try and help you forget perhaps for a while your drab, wretched lives. Here's a song all about spring-time in general, and in particular, about one of the many delightful pastimes the coming of spring affords us all.

Spring is here, a-suh-puh-ring is here
Life is skittles and life is beer
I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring

Time was when an American about to go abroad would be warned by his friends or the guidebooks not to drink the water. But times have changed and now a foreigner coming to this country might be offered the following advice.

If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air.

Pollution, pollution,

Selling out
Is easy to do –
It's not so hard
To find a buyer for you
When money talks
You're under its spell
Ah, but whaddya have when there's nothing left to sell?

What with President Johnson practicing escalatio on the Vietnamese and then the Dominican crisis on top of that it has been a nervous year and people have begun to feel like a Christian scientist with appendicitis. Fortunately in times of crisis just like this America always has this number one instrument of diplomacy to fall back on. Here's a song about it.

When someone makes a move
Of which we don't approve,
Who is it that always intervenes?
U.N. and O.A.S.,
They have their place, I guess,

And now to the love song. I'm sure you're familiar with love songs on the order of he's just my bill, my man, my joe, my max, and so on where the girl who sings them tells you that, although the
She loves is anti-social, alcoholic, physically repulsive, or just plain unsanitary, nevertheless she is his because he is hers, or something like that. but as far as I know there has never been
Pular song from the analogous male point of view, that is to say, of a man who finds himself in love with, or in this case married to, a girl who has nothing whatsoever to recommend her. I have
Pted to fill this need. the song is called she's my girl.

Sharks gotta swim, and bats gotta fly,
I gotta love one woman till I die.
To ed or dick or bob

Who can turn a can into a cane?
Who can turn a pan into a pane?
It's not too hard to see
It's Silent E

Who can turn a cub into a cube?
Who can turn a tub into a tube?
It's elementary

I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on but we know what's really involved: dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution unfortunately. Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days I have here a march for mine. It's called...

Smut!
Give me smut and nothing but!
A dirty novel I can't shut,
If it's uncut,
and unsubt- le.

I'd like to take you now on wings of song, as it were, and try and help you forget perhaps for a while your drab, wretched lives. Here's a song all about spring-time in general, and in particular, about one of the many delightful pastimes the coming of spring affords us all.

Spring is here, a-suh-puh-ring is here.
Life is skittles and life is beer.
I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring.
I do, don't you? 'Course you do.
But there's one thing that makes spring complete for me,
And makes ev'ry Sunday a treat for me.

H is for my alma mater Harvard,
C is Central, next stop on the line,
K is for the cozy Kendall station, and
C is Charles that overlooks the brine...a-
P is Park St...Pahk Street, busy Boston center, and
W is Washington you see...
Put them all together, they spell...
(HCCKKCC... PW... (sounds like somebody spitting))

Counting sheep
When you're trying to sleep,
Being fair
When there's something to share,
Being neat
When you're folding a sheet,
That's mathematics!

You take a function of x and you call it y,
Take any x0 that you care to try,
Make a little change and call it delta-x,
The corresponding change in y is what you find nex',
And then you take the quotient, and now carefully
Send delta-x to zero and I think you'll see,
That what the limit gives us, if our work all checks,
Is what we call dy/dx, it's just dy/dx.

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium

One type of song that has come into increasing prominence in recent months is the folk-song of protest. You have to admire people who sing these songs. It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on. The nicest thing about a protest song is that it makes you feel so good. I have a song here which I realise should be accompanied on a folk instrument in which category the piano does not alas qualify so imagine if you can, that I am playing an 88 string guitar.

We are the folk song army.
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.

There are innocuous folk songs.

I always will remember,
’twas a year ago november,
I went out to hunt some deer
On a mornin’ bright and clear.
I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow,
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.

I was in no mood to trifle,

About a maid I'll sing a song, rikkity tikkity tin,
About a maid I'll sing a song, who didn't have her family long,
Not only did she do them wrong,
She did every one of them in, them in,
She did every one of them in.

One morning in a fit of pique, rikkity tikkity tin,
One morning in a fit of pique, she drowned her father in the creek,

I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,
But much more for the touch of your whips, dear.
You can raise welts
Like nobody else,
As we dance to the masochism tango.

Let our love be a flame, not an ember,
Say it's me that you want to dismember.

Sleep, baby, sleep, in peace may you slumber,
No danger lurks, your sleep to encumber,
We've got the missiles, peace to determine,
And one of the fingers on the button will be German.

Why shouldn't they have nuclear warheads?
England says no, but they are all soreheads.
I say a bygone should be a bygone,

When the shades of night are falling,
Comes a fellow everyone knows.
It's the old dope peddler,
Spreading joy wherever he goes.
Every evening you will find him,
Around our neighborhood.
It's the old dope peddler
Doing well by doing good.

first you get down on your knees,
fiddle with your rosaries,
bow your head with great respect,
and genuflect, genuflect, genuflect

do whatever steps you want, if
you have cleared them with the Pontiff.
everybody say his own

Now to continue with the love song, here we have the viennese waltz type of the franz lehar/johann strauss school, conjuring up images of gaily waltzing couples and probably stale champagne drun
M sweaty slippers. this example is called the wiener schnitzel waltz.

Do you remember the night I held you so tight,
As we danced to the wiener schnitzel waltz?
The music was gay, and the setting was viennese,
Your hair wore some roses (or perhaps they were peonies),
I was blind to your obvious faults,

Along the trail you'll find me lopin'
Where the spaces are wide open,
In the land of the old A.E.C. (yea-hah!)
Where the scenery's attractive,
And the air is radioactive,
Oh, the wild west is where I wanna be.

Mid the sagebrush and the cactus,

When you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner or
Later those you love will do the same for you.
And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do.
But don't you worry.
No more ashes, no more sackcloth.

And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend 20 billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know-how, that's what. As provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun.

Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown.
"Ha, Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.

I wonder how many people here tonight remember Hubert Humphrey, he used to be a Senator. From time to time you read something about him pinning a medal on somebody or making a speech, or every now and then you read something in one of those where are they now columns: Whatever became of Deanna Durbin and Hubert Humphrey and so on.

This became quite an issue last winter at the time of Winston Churchill's funeral, when President Johnson was too ill to go and somebody suggested that he send Hubert and he said, "Hubert Who?" ...and all America was singing:

Whatever became of Hubert?
Has anyone heard a thing?
Once he shone on his own,
Now he sits home alone

Since I still appreciate you,
Let's find love while we may.
Because I know I'll hate you
When you are old and grey.

So say you love me here and now,
I'll make the most of that.
Say you love and trust me,

First we got the bomb, and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's okay,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way.
Who's next?

France got the bomb, but don't you grieve,
'Cause they're on our side (I believe).