Ashleigh Brilliant, Tom Lehrer, and the Limits of Humor

Arthur Koestler explained humor as an intersection or juxtaposition of two different meanings which then creates a new meaning of its own. Humor is necessarily a surprise, which is why jokes are seldom funny twice. 

Recently, I found the works of Ashleigh Brilliant by way of a comment from a friend online. (See NecessaryFacts for July 12, 2025.) I first listened to a Tom Lehrer record in 1966. Ashleigh Brilliant is still alive and guards his intellectual property. Tom Lehrer passed on 26 July 2025 and sometime before the end, he put all of his works into the public domain. From him, I took the titles of two posts here: “Fight Fiercely Harvard” and “Albeit they possess the might … Nonetheless we have the will.” 

Probably 15 years ago, I heard an interview with Lehrer on NPR’s “All Things Considered” in which he retracted the fun in “The Old Dope Pedlar.” After crack-cocaine and then the arrival of fentanyl, the humor seemed gross. His songs that are centered on science and mathematics hold up well enough. 

Tom Lehrer (retouched) 
Wikimedia
https://tomlehrersongs.com/

His arrangement of “The Chemical Elements” to the tune of “Modern Major General” is probably the most enduring. Several independent animations are on YouTube and Daniel Radcliffe performed it ad lib on a talk show. 

However, recently, I listened to New Math several times and I was ultimately disappointed. First of all, I don’t know how “new” he considered this, but it was how I in elementary school 1955 to 1961 learned multiplication. One difference is that he always sang “… carry…” whereas we learned to “borrow” from the higher order and “carry” to it. Also, to the point here, his humor about Base 8 was cute as a lesson but irrelevant as social criticism. 

When we learned Base 2, Base 5, Base 8, and Base 12 (1962-1964) aside from the poetry of number theory, we were told that we would use this if we ever worked with  computers which is exactly what happened. We do not use Base 5, of course, and Base 12 was offered to us then as a gateway to Base 16 which was merely cumbersome once you understood the processes of Base 12. But calculating in binary, octal, and hexadecimal has proved useful (to say the least). And Lehrer did not see this coming, even though his day job was teaching mathematics at MIT and at UC Santa Cruz. 

Ashleigh Brilliant
(Santa Barbara Independent)
https://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/ 

Also on his website are links to lyrics that were never recorded. Those were often published as doggerel in The Physical Review, sometimes with suggestions for melodies. Some of his political views are easy to accept, but others not. Some of those are rooted in their time while others are more enduring. And who could have predicted that “Fight Fiercely Harvard” would acquire a new meaning?

Diogenes of Sinope was called The Cynic because he lived “like a dog” in an abandoned wine cask. When Plato defined Man as “a featherless biped” Diogenes held up a plucked chicken.  Cynicism can deliver that other plane of meaning with which to turn a chuckle into a theorem. So, too, do the aphorisms and cartoons give you something to pause over. Eventually, many are just to be stepped over. 

I bought five books by Ashleigh Brilliant from two different sellers on Abe Books, then I bought three from Brilliant’s own website. From him, I bought his first two anthologies—I May Not be Totally Perfect but Parts of Me are Excellent; I Have Abandoned My Search for Truth, and Now Am Looking for a Good Fantasy — and his doctoral dissertation, The Great Car Craze: How Southern California Collided with the Automobile in the 1920s; When Motor Mania Made Social History. I gave the five used books to friends at the University of Texas and kept the others for my own library. 

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Aphorisms 

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Big Bang Theory: More Friends than Seinfeld 

America Surrenders to North Korea