Nightclubs: The Sabbatical Satirist

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As a statistician, he specializes in the laws of probability. As a cabaret performer, he defies them. For when Satirist Tom Lehrer "retired" from show business in 1960 to return to math and Harvard, he deliberately buried his alter ego—and, it seemed, any chance of a comeback. Many fans even believed widespread reports that he had killed himself. Instead it was Lehrer who was slaying the customers last week at San Francisco's hungry i, where he proved to be the nightclub's biggest draw since the Limelighters played there in 1959.

Some of Lehrer's numbers were old standbys updated ("Back to good old Dixie, where the jasmine and the tear gas smell jes' fine"). Others, like Pollution ("The breakfast garbage that you throw into the Bay / They drink at lunch in San Jose"), were written by Lehrer for TV's That Was the Week That Was.

But he also had a clutch of new songs that seemed fresher and more sophisticated than '50s-vintage Lehrer. In the Dominican Republic, he cracked, Johnson landed the marines "faster than you can knock down Sonny Liston." Lehrer also pinked the plunking protestniks whose St. Joan is Baez. "We are the folk song army," he chirps. "Every one of us care ... It sounds more ethnic if it ain't in good English."

Lehrer insists that he has no intention of returning to professional Tomfoolery beyond an occasional record or sabbatical nightclub engagement. At 37 ("It's a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years"), 18 years since he got his M.A., he is still working on his doctoral dissertation, regards statistics as his life work. He may be tempted, though. For his two-week hungry i stint, Lehrer pocketed $7,000. That's a statistic to regard.