Overview

• Lehrer died Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at age 97, according to longtime friend David Herder; no cause of death was released.
• He rose to prominence in the 1950s and ’60s through self-produced albums and weekly political satires on NBC’s That Was the Week That Was.
• Lehrer’s taboo-breaking songs tackled war, religion, racism and Cold War anxieties, influencing artists from Randy Newman to “Weird Al” Yankovic.
• He largely ended public performances after 1967 to focus on teaching mathematics at Harvard, MIT and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
• Although he wrote only about three dozen songs, his albums sold hundreds of thousands of copies and were later revived in the West End revue Tomfoolery.