My favo(u)rite Lehrer songs? It is hard to choose, he's absolutely one of THE wittiest songwriters ever -- Masochism Tango, We Will All Go Together When We Go, National Brotherhood Week, Vatican Rag (for starters..)

I remember hearing (quite some time ago) a progra(me) on Tom Lehrer on BBC Radio. It included an interview in which he said (amongst other things) that if he was still writing stuff these days, it would prolly be similar to Lou & Peter Berryman's songs.

Did a Google search & found a number of interesting interviews (more than I have time to read -- just picked a few that looked most promising):

There's a very good March 2003 interview which spends quite a bit of time discussing why he stopped writing/performing.

Excerpt:
Tom Lehrer is still feisty and funny, but the king of sophisticated satire tells Tony Davis there's no place for his style of humour now: the world just wouldn't get it.

"I'm not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them."

The speaker is Tom Lehrer, arguably the most famous living satirical songwriter. And, in a roundabout way, the New York-born singer, composer and mathematician is explaining why he has been all but silent since 1965.

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Also check out his interview with the Onion

Excerpts:
The Onion: I'd long heard that you stopped performing as a form of protest, because Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tom Lehrer: I don't know how that got started. I've said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize. For one thing, I quit long before that happened, so historically it doesn't make any sense. I've heard that quoted back to me, but I've also heard it quoted that I was dead, so there you are. You can't believe anything you read. That was just an off-hand remark somebody picked up, and now it's been quoted and quoted, and therefore misquoted. I've heard that I stopped because Richard Nixon was elected, or because I got put away in an insane asylum, or whatever. It was just a remark about political satire, because it was true. Not literally, but everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think. Years ago, it was much easier: We had Eisenhower to kick around. That was much funnier than Nixon.

O: Why did you leave? Why did you give up?

TL: I didn't really give up.

O: I didn't mean give up, like, "surrender."

TL: I just lay down and let them trample all over me. No, it's the wrong question, really, because there wasn't really a career to speak of. I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.

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O: Have you given any thought to performing again?

TL: I have given a lot of thought to it. The answer is always no. I've given a lot of negative thought to this question. No, I have no desire to do that. My last public performance for money was in 1967. For free, it was 1972, with the exception of two little one-shot, one-song things. But that's just for friends, out of friendship for the people involved, and also because it was fun. But, no, I don't have the temperament of a performer, and I certainly couldn't do it every night.

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Another interesting interview

Excerpts:
I got some offers to do concerts as well as night clubs. At that time there was no such thing as the pop concert circuit. If I had hung on a little longer, the college concert circuit was just breaking with the Kingston Trio and people like that. In my day there was Anna Russell and Victor Borge and me, and that was about it for comedians. Later on, of course, I could have called William Morris and said "book me for six months", but there wasn't anything like that. I did some of that, and then I got tired after a couple of years. So I figured I'll put out the rest of the material I had, and there was enough for the second record, and then I'd quit.

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What do you hear today that you like?

I don't keep up with things today. There are little bits of things. John Forster has several things, but there's no whole record that I wholeheartedly embrace. Forster's take on Paul Simon ["Fusion" on the album "Entering Marion"--Ed.] is so wonderful, "Remember who's the genius here." He has a whole sense of music, with the orchstrations and the sound effects which I never aspired to. He has fun with music, too, which is very hard to do.

Every now and then I hear a song -- Andy Breckman, Christine Lavin have a few good things. I try -- any time I hear anybody say, "oh, you gotta hear so and so", I rush out and get it. [Pulls out "Funny Folk Songs" CD] I saw this at Tower Records. It was some kind of concert with all these people doing one song, showing off. Some of them are quite funny. Lou and Peter Berryman have some funny songs. There are a lot of people who have some funny songs.

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Cheers,

YY