Ben’s post, Perpetuating Racism By Talking About It reminded me of a Tom Lehrer classic, of how much I love Lehrer’s music — and how great it is that we have YouTube.
Lehrer, the predecessor to Mark Russell (though much funnier and not as smarmy as Russell), used to appear on national television in the 60s in a show called “That Was the Week That Was” (scroll down for details about the American version) where he would do a satirical song about something in the news that week. I had an album of his best from TW3 when I was in college that I soon had memorized, but I’d never seen a photo of the reclusive Mr. Lehrer until I saw this YouTube video. As funny as Lehrer was as a songwriter and vocalist, he is incomparable when you can actually see his facial expressions.
Now, ripped once again from the headlines, Tom Lehrer and “National Brotherhood Week” (the screen is black for several seconds at the beginning of the video):
