Tom Lehrer has died, aged 97, and I can only think how wonderful it would be to have his own opinion – deadpan, mordant, in dubious taste – on his demise. The usual thing to say about the death of an artist is that it brings to an end a great career and the possibility of more work to add to their canon; that it offers the chance at last to see that work in the round. In Lehrer’s case this is so far from the truth as to be absurd: he has been at such a remove from the small body of work – some 37 songs – that made his name in the late 1950s and early 1960s that his death changes almost nothing.

For the last 50-plus years of his life, he turned his back on both performing and writing. He returned to academia and to his first love, maths, which he taught at Harvard, then MIT and then the University of California until his retirement in 2001. Before he died, he had put all his songs in the public domain, detaching himself entirely from his work, and in the process freeing it for use and re-use. The generosity of the gesture points to something of the man’s style.

Like many people, my introduction to Lehrer came through my parents, who discovered him at some point in the late 1950s, hearing his first LP at a friend’s flat. It is probably difficult to recapture now quite how different Lehrer sounded to anything else. It’s not the style of the songs per se: he has a conventional ear for a good show tune. But there is something distinctly unconventional yet compelling about his dry, knowing baritone combined with the steely civility of his diction and the zestful attack of his delivery.

It is the words that make you sit up and listen, and laugh, struck with awe at what you have just heard. Lehrer was, among many other things, a rhymer in the Byron class, capable of yoking ideas and images together with breathtaking swagger and concision:

Just sing out a Te Deum

When you see that I.C.B.M.,

He sings in ‘We Will All Go Together When We Go’. Or, from ‘The Old Dope Peddlar’:

He gives the kids free samples,

Because he knows full well

That today’s young innocent faces

Will be tomorrow’s clientele.

As will be apparent from these quotes, Lehrer’s choice of subject matter was – and often still is – considered grossly offensive. Time magazine placed Lehrer among what it called the ‘sickniks’ of contemporary comedy, alongside Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and so on. ‘The novelty and jolt of the sickniks is that their gags… come so close to real horror and brutality that audiences wince even as they laugh,’ it said. The New York Times was equally baffled by his appeal. ‘Mr Lehrer regaled a large and appreciative audience with his merry ditties of disease, dismemberment and death,’ the reviewer wrote of a Lehrer show in 1959. ‘It was the sort of program in which “necrophiliac” is a very funny word.’

Lehrer himself lapped this sort of abuse up, and he was fond of adorning his record sleeves with unfavourable salvos from the press. Lack of seriousness, even about his own talents, was something of a trademark. An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer has a handful of such barbs: ‘Plays the piano acceptably,’ from the Oakland Tribune, for example. And from the same New York Times review, ‘Mr Lehrer’s muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste,’ which is unimprovable in its stiffness and pomposity.

To like Lehrer, to get the joke, was the mark of a particular kind of postwar cool: adult, liberal, cultured, intellectual. Although Lehrer could fill theatres the size of London’s Royal Festival Hall, his natural milieu was somewhere smaller, more intimate – a night club or a cocktail party, even – where the sense of coterie was stronger. There are lots of reasons why he stopped writing and performing, but one of them was surely that what was hip and cool moved on. The counterculture of the late 1960s was anathema to Lehrer and his art, not least because it reified earnestness, a deadweight on wit and creativity then and now.

Lehrer is often characterised as a satirist, and certainly the songs from the mid-1960s fit that bill, targeting hot-off-the press subjects such as pollution, protest singers, nuclear proliferation, and the Vatican II reforms of the Catholic church. The latter song, ‘The Vatican Rag’, features a sequence of rhymes that is bravura even by Lehrer’s standards:

Get in line in that processional,

Step into that small confessional.

There the guy who’s got religion’ll

Tell you if your sin’s original.

His target more often is the canting, self-satisfied pieties of middle-class America – or rather the yawning gap between such pieties and the pitiful reality. That candour was bracing; somehow through the propulsive wit and surprise of his lyrics and his way with a hummable tune, Lehrer made it oddly, addictively delightful. One could pick any number of songs to make the point. Take ‘I Wanna Go Back To Dixie’, say:

I wanna talk with Southern gentlemen

And put my white sheet on again,

I ain’t seen one good lynchin’ in years.

Or ‘Bright College Days’:

Oh, soon we’ll be out amid the cold world’s strife.

Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life.

Tasteless? God, yes. Can any other artist boast of an oeuvre so mischievously replete with still-offensive and taboo topics – incest, necrophilia, sadomasochism, bestiality, and so on? Many of these songs are so direct and uncompromising, however dressed up they are in the old-fashioned forms of the musical theatre, that they still carry a frisson of shock. ‘I Got It From Agnes’ is an apparently sweet list-song about sexually transmitted disease. Witty to begin with, it spins off into very different territory part-way through:

Max got it from Edith,

Who gets it every spring.

She got it from her Daddy,

Who just gives her everything.

She then gave it to Daniel,

Whose spaniel has it now.

Part of Lehrer’s art was to look you in the eye and dare you to take his words at face value. The pop star Julian Cope has written brilliantly about his childhood love of Lehrer and the visceral shock his teenage-self experienced realising just what these songs he had happily sung along to were really about. ‘I summoned the mighty Oxford Dictionary, and discovered to my horror that my parents – not me, note – yes, my own parents listened to songs about having sex with the dead!’

There is something epic about the breadth of Lehrer’s tastelessness, his willingness to question what it is that is offensive, that in itself seems admirable. For all its playful depravity and sophistication, there’s something rather innocent about his work, a clever child’s brio and naivety, as if he simply described the world that he saw and never learned the kind of intellectual dishonesty and self-deceit with which society at large explained away its failings. In that way, his songs have an openness and generosity of heart that other, comparably sardonic humorists do not, and here and there he even allows a little wistful sentimentality to creep in, most obviously in ‘Alma’, about the woman who contrived to marry Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel one after the other.

Perhaps that reflected a shift in his writing as he grew older. ‘Things I once thought were funny are scary now,’ he would say in the 1980s. The later songs written for the US version of the satirical TV show That Was The Week That Was in 1965, of which ‘Alma’ was one, are typically less dark in both tone and in subject matter. Even where he returns to a topic, the brutality is missing. Take, for example, the prospect of nuclear war. In ‘We Will All Go Together When We Go’, from 1959’s More of Tom Lehrer, a typical verse runs:

And we will all bake together when we bake.

There’ll be nobody present at the wake.

With complete participation

In that grand incineration,

Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak

The 1965 song on the same theme, ‘So Long Mom (A Song For World War III)’ is almost upbeat in comparison.

So long, Mom,

I’m off to drop the bomb,

So don’t wait up for me.

But though I may roam,

I’ll come back to my home,

Although it may be

A pile of debris.

There will, after all, be an afterwards: an unusually optimistic note for Lehrer to strike. The difference in approach may be down to the restrictions of writing for a mainstream audience on network TV. Certainly, his regular act would have been unbroadcastable. Lehrer once recalled the team from the Ed Sullivan show coming to see him perform. ‘They said: “Oh, we really love your show. If you ever have anything we can use, let us know”,’ he said. Or it may be that the world for which Lehrer wrote was already passing and he knew it. ‘The liberal consensus, which was the audience for this in my day, has splintered and fragmented in such a way that it’s hard to find an issue that would be comparable to, say, lynching,’ he told the New York Times in 2000.

Nevertheless, Lehrer’s willingness to walk away from showbusiness, and latterly to give up the rights to it entirely, seems a part of his uniqueness as an artist, a part of the clear-sightedness, the absence of self-regard, the implicit challenge of the status quo. As for the songs, they are entirely of their moment; but they are so pristine in form, so bristling with intelligence and acuity, so gleefully alive in their directness, that very few of them have aged at all. Tom Lehrer is dead. Long live Tom Lehrer. He’s daring you to laugh.