Comment by ninjin

2 years ago

To quote Tom Lehrer: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."

Kissinger's legacy will be debated for a long time and I have personally only scratched the very surface. I do however intend to read Hitchen's "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" [1] one day, if not just to enjoy the fire with which he could write.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger

7 comments

ninjin

Reply
aidenn0  2 years ago

Do you have a source for the Lehrer quote? I've been told he didn't say that.

  • ninjin  2 years ago

    Good question. I have heard it referenced multiple times, but that does not make it true. Wikiquote cites The Sydney Morning Herald [1], but that is probably not a great source. I did a bit of digging online and also found The Guardian mentioning it too around the same time [2] (some twenty or so years ago). But I do not have a source that I would be willing to bet my life on.

    [1]: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/stop-cla...

    [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/jul/31/artsfeatures...

    This feels like a rabbit hole best left to proper quote investigators (and a timely one at that). Lehrer is alive though (unlike a certain someone...), so maybe one could even ask him?

    Do you have a source questioning the authenticity? Not asking you to prove a negative here, just asking since I did not find one skimming a few pages on DuckDuckGo.

  • svat  2 years ago

    Lehrer said it, but the myth is that Lehrer stopped performing for that reason — the truth is, he had stopped performing long before that, simply because he was bored of it. From https://web.archive.org/web/20051025051240/https://avclub.co...

    > 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.