To a particular subset of junior comedy nerds, of which I was an unapologetic member, 1976 was a watershed year, for a reason only tangentially connected to the official Bicentennial celebration that faced Americans down at every turn.

At a time when the vinyl record remained the primary means of owning recorded music (cassettes were coming into vogue, as were, briefly eight-tracks), the comedy sections of record stores were relatively low on product. Without access to a really good used record store, it was particularly hard to find vintage comedy recordings, and by vintage at age 14, that meant anything older than 10 years. Cosby and Carlin filled the racks, but beyond them it was luck of the draw. Believe me, I looked.

So when the essential Barry Hansen, aka Dr. Demento, began “serializing” Stan Freberg’s 1961 album “Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America Volume One: The Early Years,” it was nothing less than a revelation. Conceived as the cast recording of a Broadway musical that never was, with Freberg writing, composing and performing many of the vocal chores, “America” was, to my mind a masterpiece, and I was thrilled when, in the wake of its showcase on Dr. Demento’s show, it was rereleased by Capitol Records, so I could listen to it again and again (which I did, and still do).

As Freberg’s witty, wise-guy approach to everything from the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Battle of Yorktown proved subtler than Mad Magazine, not as raw as the National Lampoon, and as tuneful any classic cast album, I was hooked. I even went so far as to write down to the lyrics to every song (some in two and three part counterpoint), which involved constantly lifting the needle and dropping it back again, so that I could truly commit the songs to memory, where they remain.

Freberg’s voice, as it happened, was plenty familiar, as he had been a cartoon voice artist for years, but as I grew older, I learned more about his work.

• That he was part one of television’s earliest children’s shows, Time For Beany, whose most popular character, performed by Freberg, was Cecil, seasick sea serpent (initially a live puppet show, it was much later made into an animated cartoon).

• That he had been a charting recording artist, who broke out with a record called “John and Marsha,” which consisted of nothing but some romantic string music and a male and female voices saying “John” and “Marsha” in a way that charted a relationship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkfwmB8jeSU

• That he obviously found the Jack Webb TV procedural Dragnet an endless source of amusement, as he parodied it often (with Webb’s support).

• That he had one of the last network radio comedy shows, having filled the gap left when Jack Benny shifted to television (a favorite target of Freberg’s). And, most startlingly, that by the time I discovered him, he had largely left the comedy business in order to bring humor into advertising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY2VAIIQAj4

• That he wrote the longest radio commercial ever, which became so popular that it was recorded and released commercially.

I raise all of this because today would have been Stan Freberg’s 90^th birthday. Unfortunately he passed away at the age of 88 early last year. I regret never having sent him a fan letter, never having made an attempt to meet him on one of my irregular forays to Los Angeles.

Listening to 50+ year old comedy can be a mixed bag, but when I came to Freberg’s work, it was only 15 to 20 years old, so the majority of the comedic references were sufficiently current for me. Today, his parodies of Mitch Miller and Arthur Godfrey don’t resonate as they would have in Freberg’s heyday; his cutting satires of everything from the commercialization of Christmas to the McCarthy hearings can be appreciated for their virtuosity, but they don’t necessarily elicit laughs. That said, Freberg’s riff on censorship and “political correctness” from 1957 holds up very well.

And because his humor was – like that of my other comedic heroes from the same era,  Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman and Bob and Ray – entirely aural, there aren’t copious videos to show Freberg at work. YouTube reveals page after page of Freberg routines, but the images are often of static record labels, of montages of photos.

Because he was more prolific than Lehrer and, even truncated, his comedy career was longer than Sherman’s, I have more Stan Freberg discs on my shelves than those two artists put together – included the complete boxed set of his radio shows (well, it was canceled after only four months of weekly airings). But just as I play Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons In The Park” every year on the first day of spring, and play Bob and Ray’s “Komodo Dragon Expert” every time I want to demonstrate what truly inept interviewing and moderating skills sound like, Freberg gets a spin at least once a year, on the Fourth of July, when his masterwork “The United States of America” underlines and undermines every patriotic expression of the day.

Happy birthday, Stan Freberg. I knew you, but oh, how I wish I’d known you.

My memory of the moment is quite vivid, if inevitably inexact. It happened 41 years ago, in the early afternoon, in Mrs. Winkler’s seventh grade science class at Amity Junior High School, as we were doing a “unit” on Ecology. In order to brighten our study of the physical environment, Mrs. Winkler announced one day at the start of class that she wanted to play us a song, and proceeded to put a black vinyl disc on the industrial weight turntable, the cover of which doubled as a speaker. The song she played was a savagely funny cri de coeur about how America’s cities and resources had been ruined by the scourge of pollution, from the perspective of a someone warning a foreign visitor about coming to America.

That was the day I first heard, and heard of, Tom Lehrer.

Not long thereafter, at a garage sale, I would discover a 10 inch, 33 rpm record, “Songs by Tom Lehrer” (on Lehrer Records), which I immediately seized and paid, I imagine, 25 cents to possess. Lehrer joined Allan Sherman and Stan Freberg among the small coterie of singing comedians to whom I became devoted, committing their songs to memory and happily singing them acapella for friends who had no earthly idea where I’d found these strange but funny tunes. After all, Sherman died in 1973, Freberg had shifted from comedy into advertising, and Lehrer’s U.S. fame had peaked on That Was The Week That Was, a short-lived TV precursor to The Daily Show back in 1964 (where he once took on the decimal system on the original British version of the show).

While Lehrer was a genuinely formative influence, who is rarely far from my mind, I think of him specially today because April 9, 2016 marks his 88^th birthday. With Sherman gone for than 40 years and Freberg having passed just last year, Lehrer is the last surviving member of my own sung comedy superteam, and while it’s quite clear that there is nothing Lehrer would like less than to be celebrated for work he largely stopped doing 50 years ago (this BuzzFeed piece from two years ago explains), and even further back, it’s hard to restrain oneself.

This, of course, is the challenge of being a Tom Lehrer fan. While much of the work is evergreen, the majority of it was written in the 1950s and first half of the 60s, and Lehrer largely stopped performing by the time 1970s rolled around. Some have written that Lehrer’s withdrawal from performance was because he is – as a mathematician by training and primary trade – a perfectionist, and that he took no pleasure from concerts because he was determined to reproduce his recordings. Others have suggested that what was daring and ribald in the 50s ran smack against the counterculture of the late 60s, which Lehrer didn’t care for.

In any event, to the dismay of fans of funny, topical songs, Lehrer refocused himself on teaching. The result for comedy geeks was that he became, almost, our J.D. Salinger. Although he hid in plain sight, his students knew better than to discuss his performing fame; though almost no new work appeared, it was clear that he had not shunned his piano and verbal repartee, as the occasional song slipped out, or the odd public appearance. He gave a rare interview to National Public Radio in 1979; he spoke with The New York Times in 2000. Perhaps his last burst of general public fame came when the producer Cameron Mackintosh brought the musical revue Tomfoolery, comprised of Lehrer’s songs, to the stage in London and later New York. But that was in the early 1980s, almost two generations ago now, so Lehrer fans can even be nostalgic for that moment of nostalgia.

Not all of Lehrer’s material still plays today: in this era when space exploration has been minimized, a song about early rocket scientist Werner von Braun is hardly a source of laughter; post-Cold War, a cowboy crooning about the Atomic Energy Commission is perhaps too obscure. But a jazzy pop tune about Oedipus Rex can still crack up the college crowd, and anyone old enough to know of masochism is sure to find humor in a tango celebrating sexual gratification through pain. On the first day of spring each year, the idea of ridding our cities of the overpopulation of pigeons can still resonate. The NRA probably still doesn’t care for a hunting song about an inept marksman. Sexually transmitted diseases, sad to say, are perennial. And while National Brotherhood Week may be gone, a song about that effort to heal cultural rifts still stings.

It may be the very last thing he wants, but today I’ll place a candle in a cupcake and wish for the continued health of Tom Lehrer, hoping, as I do every day, that he might one day be revealed to have been writing songs all this time, and shares them with us, even if not in performance, then at least as sheet music, the better to celebrate him with. Even if he doesn’t want us to do so.

P.S. Did I mention that Lehrer went to summer camp with Stephen Sondheim? Just wanted to toss that in. The verbal dexterity on the swim team that summer must have been quite something.

*   *   *

Whether you’re a Lehrer devotee or newly curious, I recommend watching this mid-60s live show from Copenhagen, in which he performs many of his best known songs for a relatively reserved college crowd.

While the Copenhagen concert has yielded an array of YouTube clips, much lesser seen is a short performance Lehrer gave for one of his teaching colleagues, stocked with an array of unrecorded songs, heavy on mathematics humor.

Strictly for the fans, here’s a decidedly odd industrial clip of Lehrer singing the praises of a new Dodge car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3htMuJhz5Y

If you’d like to introduce younger kids to Lehrer, paving the way for them to discover his more transgressive work when they get older, here’s a bit of educational material from TV’s The Electric Company.

While “cover” versions of Tom Lehrer tunes are rare, here’s the late British comic Marty Feldman having his way with “The Vatican Rag.”

Of course, there’s also Daniel Radcliffe singing “The Element Song.”

I’ll wrap this up with what may be one of Lehrer’s last released songs to date, which is simply the best Hannukah song ever written.

As a teen in the 1970s, I kept testing a small sociological phenomenon. When visiting a Jewish home, I would peek at the record collection of the adults in residence to see if they had the album “My Son, The Folk Singer.” If the family was Catholic or Protestant, I’d look for “The First Family” featuring Vaughn Meader. To my recollection, I never failed to find the anticipated album in the expected home, even though both records were already at least a decade old before I began my study. While this did not foretell a future career as a social anthropologist, it always gave me a little hit of satisfaction, as if I’d tumbled to some unique cultural signifier.

“The First Family” was a 1962 comedy album that satirized the Kennedy  clan very lightly and it briefly made a star of Meader. Of course, his career as a JFK impersonator was cut short in November 1963, but for one year, his fame was such that reportedly when Lenny Bruce performed for the first time after the president’s assassination, his first words were reportedly some variant of, “Wow, Vaughn Meader’s screwed.”

“My Son, The Folk Singer” was written and performed by a previously all but unknown TV writer and producer named Allan Sherman, who was in his late 30s when the recording debuted in 1962. It was such a phenomenon that it set sales records not simply for comedy records but for the recording industry in general, and demand for Sherman’s Yiddish inflected and overwhelmingly Jewish parodies of folk and later popular songs was such that he released his first three albums (out of eight in his whole career) within a single 12-month period. For a few years he was a huge name – touring night clubs and concert venues, guest hosting for Johnny Carson, appearing in his own TV specials – but he turned out to be a fad, especially as radio formats changed, marginalizing novelty records. When he died of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of 49, his career has already been all but over for several years. I discovered Sherman at roughly the same time, unaware of his passing — I can still sing any number of his parodies at the drop of a hat.

The new biography, Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman by Mark Cohen (Brandeis University Press, $29.95) is a comprehensive look at the career of the man best remembered today, if at all (outside of older Jews and comedy buffs), for his tale of a summer camp sojourn gone awry, “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.” As might be expected of a book that is part of the publishing house’s “Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life,” Sensation views Sherman through a Semitic lens, arguing for his role in popular acceptance of Jews in American culture. While Jewish comedians (and writers, performers, and so on) had flourished for decades, Cohen posits that Sherman’s success was a key crossover point that freed Jewish artists to speak openly of their race, and indeed Jewish identity was central to Sherman’s earliest work. That he was welcomed at The White House is touted as a symbol of Sherman’s cross-cultural barrier breaking, as is his popular success throughout the country.

Because of its concentration on this thesis, the book seems to give somewhat short shrift to other Jews breaking into popular consciousness and in some cases into the mainstream at about the same time; the fertile environment for recorded comedy, at its height in the early 60s, is likewise diminished. Stan Freberg (The History of The United States of America) and Tom Lehrer (“Poisoning Pigeons in the Park“) merit nary a mention (despite writing both words and music to their melodic satires before Sherman came on the scene; the latter Jewish, the former not); non-singing Jewish comics like Shelley Berman and Brooks & Reiner (The 2,000 Year Old Man) are given little attention.  That’s not to say Sherman wasn’t important, but he didn’t exist in a vacuum. He burned brighter for a short time, and had a verbal dexterity admired even by Richard Rodgers, but it’s Lehrer and Freberg’s work that is often cited for its brilliance by comedians and composers a half-century later. Reiner, Brooks and Woody Allen (“The Moose“) may have started slower, but were surely more influential Jewish voices in the long run.

Sherman’s story plays out like the script of a thorough, culturally oriented “Behind The Music” episode, with a bit of Jewish motherdom thrown in for good measure. Cohen breaks down the comedian’s life as: he came from a terrible, broken family (such a shondeh) as a result of which he never grew up; he was a parodic genius (we’re kvelling); and already predisposed to poor health by his weight, he was done in by the trappings of success even as it left him (he’s always shicker, and cavorting with shiksas). There’s more than a hint of posthumous guilt being levied on Sherman for his various appetites (both gustatory and carnal) and shortcomings, while the enthusiasm for his culturally specific parodic work is unstinting. But the book’s research and complete lifetime overview makes it a vastly better reference document than Sherman’s autobiography, A Gift of Laughter, published in 1965 just as his career began to wane – and, according to Sensation, largely ghost-written and intermittently dishonest.

Coming from an academic press into a world that has largely forgotten him, Overweight Sensation is unlikely to spark a Sherman renaissance, but it does thoroughly memorialize the career of a man whose comedy prefigured that of other singing parodists, notably Al Yankovic, with whom he shared on obsessions with songs about food and weight (i.e. Sherman’s “Grow Mrs. Goldfarb” and “Hail To Thee, Fat Person“; Weird Al’s “Fat” and “Eat It“).  It also has the bonus of an appendix featuring lyrics Sherman wrote and never released commercially; based on familiar songs, readers can easily sing them for themselves. And if he was not the sole trailblazer for Jewish life and language assimilating into mainstream culture, he certainly played a key role that is deserving of acknowledgement and remembrance, as do some of his parodies, which can still bring laughs 50 years on.

The advent of mp3s has made Sherman’s work readily accessible again after long periods out of print, and YouTube offers the opportunity to sample his oeuvre, beyond the familiarity of the hazard-filled Camp Granada. For a cursory introduction (or reminder), I recommend both the heavily Jewish inventiveness of “Sarah Jackman,” “Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max,” and “My Zelda” and the more secular jauntiness of “Eight Foot Two Solid Blue,” “You Went The Wrong Way Old King Louie,” and (with Sherman on video) “Skin” and “The Painless Dentist Song.”

P.S. No relation.