Overview

• Tom Lehrer died on July 26, 2025, at his Cambridge, Massachusetts home at age 97, as confirmed by longtime friend David Herder.
• Following his death, musicians and comedians such as “Weird Al” Yankovic and Randy Newman paid tribute to his pioneering wit and musical satire.
• Lehrer’s concise catalog of roughly three dozen songs skewered marriage, politics, racism and nuclear anxieties with erudite humor and a Gilbert and Sullivan–inspired style.
• He stepped away from public performance in the late 1960s to focus on academia and went on to teach mathematics at Harvard, MIT and UC Santa Cruz into his late 70s.
• In 2020, he relinquished his copyrights, granting free public access to his songs and catalyzing their widespread rediscovery.