It’s very flattering that people remember the songs and have kept them alive all these years,” Mr. Lehrer told The Boston Globe in 1984, “but it’s a little unreal."

There never was a time like the 1950s — not even during the 1950s. Not if you have in mind the decade of conformity, of moms in pearls and churchgoing families, of patriotic youth and apple pies cooling on the sills of tidy new suburban homes.

Musician and satirist Tom Lehrer stuck his alma mater into his music. Here's all the times he was singing about Harvard.

Tom Lehrer was a mathematician—and quite a good one, by all accounts. Which makes it all the more interesting that he was renowned mostly for sitting at a piano with a sly grin on his face. Always wearing a suit and horn-rim glasses, he would sing ...