Tom Lehrer is to piano-based satire what the Sex Pistols are to punk and Jerry Sadowitz is to stand-up. A university mathematician by profession, he gained notoriety in the 1950s with two albums of sometimes viciously comic songs. Poisoning Pigeons in the Park is the best known - "We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment/Except for the few we take home to experiment" - and his blacker moments are as cruel as anything thrown up by the alternative comedy boom. Behind his witty rhymes lurk lyrics about paedophiles, multiple murderers and mutilators.
All this seems a long way from the cosy school of cabaret exemplified by Kit and the Widow and Fascinating Aida, which has always struck me as a comedy born of privilege, carrying an air of the self-satisfied. But put those same performers - Kit Hesketh-Harvey and his Widow, plus Aida's Dillie Keane - in a production based on Lehrer's songs and you get a friction that makes it more than a Home Counties smug-fest.
Tom Foolery has a simple premise: a compilation of Lehrer songs linked by brief sections of banter from the three cabaret performers, joined by the actor Matthew Wolfenden. Devised by Cameron Mackintosh in 1980, the show has had its script updated for 2005, although it's hardly on a par with the bite of Lehrer's lyrics. Simply to name-check Blunkett, Bush and Blair is not the way to start a revolution. A little more daring are the odd insertions into the songs themselves, such as the appearance of George Bush and Michael Moore into National Brotherhood Week.
But the best of these numbers retain their edge unaided, reminding us how little the political agenda has changed. Lehrer's sideswipes at pollution, education, religion and militarism could be straight out of today's paper. What the performers bring is musicality, colour and variety - best of all being Wolfenden's interpretation of The Old Dope Peddler, a song about pushing drugs to children, as if it were the prettiest of lullabies.
· At Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, until Saturday. Box office: 01483 440000. Then touring.
