Just last week I was thinking about Mr Lehrer's friend Hen3ry:
The 3 was silent, you see. Henry was financially independent having inherited his father's tar-and-feather business and was therefore able to devote his full time to such intellectual pursuits as writing. I particularly remember a heart-warming novel of his about a young necrophiliac who finally achieved his boy-hood ambition by becoming coroner. (The rest of you can look it up when you get home.) In addition to writing, he indulged in a good deal of philosophizing. Like so many contemporary philosophers he especially enjoyed giving helpful advice to people who were happier than he was. One particular bit of advice which I recall, which is the reason I bring up this whole, dreary story, is something he said once before they took him away to the Massachusetts State Home for the Bewildered. He said: "Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it."As I have not recently had the opportunity to visit the comedy albums I listened to obsessively in my youth, and human memory being what it is, I erroneously recalled that Hen3ry's story formed the introduction to Mr Lehrer's song about Mexico, rather than for the finale of that show, the revivalist anthem celebrating the silver lining of a nuclear war: it would leave no-one behind to mourn. (I once saw "We Will All Go Together When We Go" performed at a mid-80s peace/disarmament rally by a prominent Australian folk singer, which would have amused/appalled Mr Lehrer no end.) This memory lapse meant I erased the introduction to "In Old Mexico", the biography of Samuel Gall, inventor of the gall bladder, who had started university majoring "in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it one day", before switching to medicine and inventing gargling, then going on to specialize in "diseases of the rich".
I've linked to it before, I'm sure, but here is Mr Lehrer's concert in Copenhagen.