In addition to his professorship at Cornell, Kahn sang baritone in university productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas from 1964 until retiring from the stage in 2000; he did a particularly fine turn as the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe in the early 1970s. He was badly injured in a 2003 car crash and endowed the New York hospital that saved him with funds to set up a camera traffic-surveillance system so emergency-room doctors could view the accidents that injured their patients.