Tom Lehrer
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50 free Tom Lehrer trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tom Lehrer wrote only a few dozen songs, gave barely a hundred concerts and walked away from show business while audiences were still asking for more. Yet the songs, tidy little waltzes, rags and marches about very untidy subjects, have outlasted almost everything else in comedy from their era. This quiz covers the whole story: the self-financed first record sold around a college campus, the tours and bans abroad, the topical songs of the 1960s, the decades spent in lecture halls, and the performers and fans who kept the work alive. It suits long-time fans who can sing the list songs from memory and newcomers who know only a tune or two. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing more than you arrived with.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which party drink did Tom Lehrer say he invented to beat an alcohol ban at a military base?
The Jello shot
The Jello shot, by his own account, came out of his Army years of 1955 to 1957, when he was a drafted enlisted man who already held a master's degree.
Q 02Which rapper sampled Tom Lehrer's 1953 song The Old Dope Peddler on a 2012 debut album?
2 Chainz
2 Chainz used it on Based on a T.R.U. Story, and Lehrer said he was very proud to be sampled sixty years after recording the song.
Q 03Which Harry Potter star sang Tom Lehrer's The Elements on The Graham Norton Show in 2010?
Daniel Radcliffe
Daniel Radcliffe recited every word by heart on the chat show, leaving fellow guests Colin Farrell and Rihanna unsure what to make of the feat.
Q 04Tom Lehrer joked that satire became obsolete when which statesman won the Nobel Peace Prize?
Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger received the 1973 prize, and Lehrer made the remark that year, though he later called it an off-hand line and not his real reason for quitting.
Q 05Which future Broadway composer spent boyhood summers at the same Maine camp as Tom Lehrer?
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim was a camper at Camp Androscoggin in Wayne, Maine, the boys' camp Lehrer attended as a camper and later as a counselor.
Q 06A studio pianist fell off his stool on hearing which birds a Tom Lehrer waltz was about poisoning?
Pigeons
Pigeons were being culled in Boston with strychnine-treated corn in the 1950s, the real practice behind Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.
Q 07Which royal's fondness for Tom Lehrer's songs, revealed in a 1957 university speech, launched him in Britain?
Princess Margaret
Princess Margaret was receiving an honorary music degree from the University of London, and the speech won his five-year-old debut album British distribution.
Q 08What did Tom Lehrer do with the lyrics and music of every song he had written, in October 2020?
Made them public domain
He made them public domain, telling fans to help themselves and not send money, then gave up his recording and performing rights as well in 2022.
Q 09Which rocket scientist, who served Nazi Germany before leading American rocketry, did Tom Lehrer mock in song?
Wernher von Braun
Wernher von Braun reached the United States under Operation Paperclip and ran its rocket programme in the 1960s, just as Lehrer was writing topical satire.
Q 10Tom Lehrer's The Elements borrows the Major-General's Song from which Gilbert and Sullivan opera?
The Pirates of Penzance
The Pirates of Penzance supplied the melody, while the idea of a breakneck list came from a 1941 patter number that rattles off fifty Russian composers.
Q 11Tom Lehrer wrote topical songs in the 1960s for the American edition of which satirical NBC television show?
That Was the Week That Was
That Was the Week That Was used his songs without him: another singer performed them, to his chagrin, and lines were often cut.
Q 12For which 1970s PBS children's series did Tom Lehrer write ten songs, including Silent E?
The Electric Company
The Electric Company was aimed at children who had graduated from Sesame Street, and Lehrer was the only one of its songwriters from outside the in-house staff.
Q 13Tom Lehrer's surname is the German word for which occupation, one he pursued for most of his adult life?
Teacher
Q 21Besides mathematics, which subject did Tom Lehrer teach to California undergraduates for nearly three decades?
Musical theater
Musical theater was the main influence on his own songs, and it was his offer to give courses in it that first got him hired out west.
Q 22Tom Lehrer revealed in 2020 that his 1950s Army service had been spent at which secretive US agency?
The NSA
The NSA was so secret then that its very existence was classified, so Lehrer let people assume he had been doing nuclear weapons work.
Q 23Which syndicated radio host made Tom Lehrer's songs a staple of his show and introduced his 2000 box set?
Dr. Demento
Dr. Demento, the on-air name of Barret Hansen, praised Lehrer as the best musical satirist of the twentieth century.
Teacher is the meaning of Lehrer in German, and he earned the name by giving classes at four American colleges before retiring in 2001.
Q 14Which grisly tale did Tom Lehrer begin adapting as a Broadway musical, years before another writer got there first?
Sweeney Todd
Sweeney Todd got as far as a few songs written with Joe Raposo, with the comedian Jerry Colonna lined up to star, before the project fizzled out.
Q 15Which sitcom character drunkenly sings Tom Lehrer's The Elements while accepting a university award in 2010?
Sheldon Cooper
Sheldon Cooper launches into it in The Big Bang Theory episode The Pants Alternative, one of several television shows to borrow the song.
Q 16Which qualification did Tom Lehrer abandon in 1965 after working on it at Harvard, on and off, for 15 years?
A doctorate
A doctorate would have ended a life he loved: Lehrer said he just wanted to be a grad student, and nobody can stay one after finishing the thesis.
Q 17Which broadcaster boosted Tom Lehrer's British sales in 1958 by banning ten of his debut album's twelve songs?
The BBC
The BBC ban worked like an advertisement, and with university newspapers also writing about the songs the record finally sold in real numbers.
Q 18About how much did Tom Lehrer pay for the one-hour studio session that produced his 1953 debut album?
$15
$15 covered the whole session in Boston, and Lehrer paid for a first pressing of just 400 copies himself, selling them around the Harvard campus.
Q 19Which college sport's rowdy anthems does Tom Lehrer's genteel 1945 song Fight Fiercely, Harvard send up?
Football
Football crowds at Harvard later adopted the joke, and Lehrer was pleased to learn the song had been played at every home game for many years.
Q 20Tired of shovelling snow in Massachusetts, Tom Lehrer joined the faculty of which California university in 1972?
UC Santa Cruz
UC Santa Cruz took him on at arts-minded Cowell College, where his official title was lecturer in American studies, not mathematics.
Q 24Which producer, later behind Cats and Les Misérables, staged the 1980 London revue of Tom Lehrer's songs, Tomfoolery?
Cameron Mackintosh
Cameron Mackintosh later put Lehrer on the bill of his 1998 London gala Hey, Mr. Producer!, the satirist's first public performance in 18 years.
Q 25The bomber in which 1994 action film sings a line from Tom Lehrer's song Be Prepared?
Speed
Speed gives the line to Dennis Hopper's villain, quoting a risqué song that a police commissioner had tried to head off on Lehrer's 1960 tour abroad.
Q 26For which Greek tragedy did Tom Lehrer write a ragtime title song, deciding a 1957 film of it lacked a hit tune?
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus Rex also let Lehrer tease the fashion for Freudian psychoanalysis, whose best-known complex had made the name familiar across 1950s America.
Q 27Which US vice president does a 1965 Tom Lehrer song tease for fading from view under Lyndon Johnson?
Hubert Humphrey
Hubert Humphrey gets a song whose title asks what became of him, voicing liberals' frustration at his deference to the more domineering Johnson.
Q 28Which country did Tom Lehrer tour in 1960, where he said he was censored and threatened with arrest?
Australia
Australia and neighbouring New Zealand heard 33 concerts between them, and a live album from the tour was released in no other country.
Q 29Which science fiction author called a 1954 Tom Lehrer nightclub show the best time he ever had at a nightclub?
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov, then a Boston University professor, described the evening in his autobiography and later printed one of Lehrer's lyrics with permission.
Q 30Which Russian mathematician gives his name to Tom Lehrer's song about getting ahead in academia by plagiarism?
Nikolai Lobachevsky
Nikolai Lobachevsky did nothing to earn it: Lehrer said the name was chosen solely for prosodic reasons and meant no slur on the man's character.