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Three players strut their stuff for ‘Pollution’ from the ‘Tomfoolery’ production.

"Be it ever so decadent," Tom Lehrer sang 40 years ago, "there’s no place like home."

Lehrer’s deliciously cynical humor is as funny now as when the singing math professor first made us laugh at things we didn’t think we could laugh at years ago.

Lehrer’s wit shines in "Tomfoolery," OpenStage Repertory Theater’s satirical review, which opened over the weekend and plays in Santa Cruz through Jan. 21.

Lehrer, who teaches math at UCSC, may not have shown us any new songs in decades. But the old ones are just as funny — and as relevant.

"Fish got to swim, birds got to fly. But they won’t last long if they try," he sang in "Pollution."

"Wear a gas mask and a veil. Then you can breathe, as long as you don’t inhale."

Lehrer wrote those words of advice 40 years ago.

If you chortle every time you remember a Tom Lehrer line (like his merry anthem to the atomic bomb: "There will be no more misery when the world is a rotisserie. We will all go together when we go."), then the show is both nostalgic and refreshing, cynical and inventively clever.

But I kept thinking: What would it be like if you went to see "Tomfoolery" never having heard Lehrer’s songs and not sharing his caustic humor, which is nastily expressed in 32 songs about old dope peddlers, masochistic lovers, pigeon poisoners, cheerful killers and carefree bomb makers?

Watch out, I concluded.

So before you go, here’s a sampling to test whether you’re likely to laugh at Lehrer:

Fun, never dull, never draggy, sung and told by the cast of five (Mary Ann Kent, Cat Winske, Dan Galpin, George King and Richard Saldavia), all of whom can deliver a comic song.

Director Jon Rosen and his cast have cleverly added a lot of physical, prop and costume humor to the sardonic lyrics, so that each song becomes a venomous vignette certain to delight people with warped senses of humor, which includes just about everyone I know, I’m happy to say.

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