YMMV / Tom Lehrer

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Shockingly, the subject of "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" wasn't something Tom came up with. During the 50's, using strychnine-laced corn to kill pigeons was a US government-backed act of pigeon population control.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park":
    "We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment, except for the few we take home to experiment!"
  • Another pair of examples is "The Old Dope Peddler", which was so over the top when it was written that people nearly died of laughter, but when performed to modern audiences, the laughter just . . . dies away by the end because it's too topical, and "The Masochism Tango", which is so over the top it still crosses the line in the day and age of the Obligatory Bondage Song.
  • And "We Will All Go Together When We Go", which was about a nuclear holocaust.
    "Just sing out a Te Deum/When you see that ICBM/And the party will be 'come as you are'!"
  • At least half his songs qualify for this trope - and they don't cross the line twice so much as dance back & forth over the line, to the sound of a catchy little piano ditty.
  • Special mention must surely go to "I Got It from Agnes", which opens with the simple premise that an STD is working its way around his group of friends and they're happy with this. Then, as it lists who got it from whom, you notice around the second verse that some of his friends are clearly gay - a little controversial for its day, but nothing major. Then it mentions Pierre, who got it from François and Jacques. And Edith who got it from her father "who just gives her everything". And Daniel, whose spaniel has it now. And then it reveals that their dentist even got it and they're still wondering how.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • His 1960s song "George Murphy", about a senator with a former showbiz career, gets a cheap laugh from the less-than-impressive career of another politician with similar background...Ronald Reagan.
  • In "Smut," he sings:
    I could tell you things about Peter Pan
    And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!
    • Decades later, Alan Moore wrote Lost Girls, a pornographic graphic novel starring, among others, Wendy Darling and Dorothy Gale.
  • He also played Harsher in Hindsight for a laugh, more recently saying this of "When You Are Old and Grey":
    Lehrer: I must confess, I wrote that song when I was 21 years old and it doesn't seem quite so funny anymore...
  • In "New Math", he points out that the titular education reform was meant to help kids understand what they're doing during calculations, even as it leaves parents confused and unable to help their kids. While New Math was mostly abandoned, the subtraction method he demonstrates in the song actually stuck around. Fast-forward to the mid-2010's, and the Common Core curriculum is going down the exact same route, including new ways to learn subtraction because the "old" way (read: New Math way) doesn't teach kids what they're doing.
  • With certain Vatican Issues in the news, variations on the line about kindly Parson Brown in "My Home Town" take on an eerie perspective:
    "We're recording tonight, so I have to leave this line out."
  • On An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer, he describes his friend who spelled his name Hen3ry.^note He explains that the 3 was silent. In other words, he was the first L33t Speaker!
  • Pollution's line "Then you can breathe, long as you don't inhale." got much funnier during the Clinton years.
  • His self-introduction in Tom Lehrer Revisited mentions that he's "currently working on a musical comedy based on the life of Adolf Hitler", 8 years before The Producers and "Springtime for Hitler". In some live performances he also joked about translating The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into Latin, which, yes, someone actually did.
  • Notable amount of people won't ever be able to listen to I Hold Your Hand In Mine without a certain associations coming to mind.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • YTMND seems to like putting together "The Elements"/"New Math" together with a clip of Stan talking.
  • Making up new verses for the "L-Y" song. For example, this YouTube gem:
    You're on a Thailand trip
    When your girlfriend's panties rip
    How do you bail when you notice she's a guy?
    Tactfully...
    Tactfully...
    Tactful...L-Y!
    • Or this one:
    You're playing a Dark Souls game
    And you're trying to link the flame
    If you can't git gud then how are you going to die?
    Frequently...
    Frequently...
    Frequent...L-Y!
• Squick: It is a considerable credit to his songwriting talents that even after nearly half a century and all the moral decay that entails, the Black Comedy of some of his lyrics can still turn a few heads.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "That's Mathematics" was originally written to the tune of "That's Entertainment", but he couldn't get the rights so he had to write a new tune (which is still similar because it had to fit the existing lyrics).
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Since they were based on current events, the songs on That Was the Year That Was are this to varying degrees. His song intros provide most of the background, but the lyrics still slip in references here-and-there that might not be so obvious to modern listeners, like the mention of Sheriff Jim Clark (the orchestrator of the Bloody Sunday attacks in Selma, Alabama) in "National Brotherhood Week".
  • "New Math" fits this twice over. The "new math" the song is poking fun at faced massive backlash and was quickly abandoned. Moreover, the one part of it that Lehrer chose to specifically pick apart for the song just so happened to be the one part of "new math" that actually stuck around, leaving most modern listeners to have no idea why he's presenting a perfectly normal subtraction problem in a tone that suggests you're supposed to find it silly.
  • The version of "That's Mathematics" featured on The Remains of Tom Lehrer box set edits out the verse about Andrew Wiles solving Fermat's Last Theorem to avoid this.
  • "We Will All Go Together When We Go" has some depressingly-timeless Gallows Humor regarding what would happen to us in the event of a full nuclear war, albeit such worries being at the forefront is marked at being of a time when there was a valid reason to worry it could happen any day. What truly marks it as a song from the '50s, though, is the line that we would become "nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak". A listener when the song was new would be hit by how truly destructive nuclear weapons are with that line; a modern listener would just be surprised to learn that the world population only broke three billion in 1960.

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