A mayoral proclamation declaring April 9 to be “Tom Lehrer Day” is always part of the annual proceedings. But it’s all done, still, without the cooperation of Lehrer himself.

TOM LEHRER: Here's a song I always get requests for, but I can't understand, for the life of me, why. It's simply the names of the chemical elements set to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune.

Tom Lehrer is the greatest comic songwriter of the last century. Okay. Maybe that’s too much. But he’s definitely the most hilarious of the last 89 years. (His 89th birthday is upon us.) At ...

More of Tom Lehrer, 11 new songs including the great nuclear-age revival-tent song "We Will All Go Together When We Go" and "The Masochism Tango," followed in 1959.

The genius of these songs is that even with such restrictive formats, Tom Lehrer is still able to create unexpected jokes and moments of joy. It would have been easy for Lehrer to be pretentious.

Satirist Tom Lehrer has put his songs into the public domain Anyone’s now free to record or perform the 92-year-old songwriter’s parodies without owing royalties or consulting lawyers.

Recorded in 1959, "An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer" hasn't dated much at all. I guess jokes about Oedipus Rex and nuclear war are perennials. Incidentally, "So Long Mom" is on the next album ...

But two recent stories — both about intellectual property law — have helped answer that question nevertheless. Let’s take them one at a time. Many people today don’t remember Tom Lehrer.

TOM LEHRER MAY represent the apex of nerd humor: an erudite Harvard grad and MIT math professor who can list all 102 known chemical elements and set it to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune. Oh, and ...

Being a Tom Lehrer fan used to be hard work. Oh, not in terms of finding his music; that was simple enough, since the man only released three albums' worth of material between 1953 and 1965 ...