If you were a white American male between the ages of fifteen and thirty during the late 1960s and early 1970s, you likely encountered the Firesign Theatre, a comedy group from LA that consisted of Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Phil Proctor. George Carlin said listening to Firesign was “like having the American culture explode in front of you and land all over the wall.” The group ventriloquized the voices of authority—parents, school principals, cops, military officers, judges, politicians, newscasters, Soviet apparatchiks—and turned them into expressions of mass insanity. Unabashedly puerile (and proud potheads), they took every opportunity to make sexual and drug-related puns, but they were equally adept at cracking jokes about modernist literature and ancient philosophy. When Monty Python made its first US tour, in 1973, Michael Palin told a reporter that “everyone’s been telling us over here we’re like something called Firesign Theatre.”

They were a far cry from the comedy record boom of the early 1960s, when skits about middle-class neurotics launched the careers of Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman, and Nichols and May. Instead of relying on the usual formula of setup, escalation, and twist, Firesign combined the techniques of old-time radio and psychedelic music to create surreal audio plays with multilayered soundscapes. (Their label, Columbia, marketed them as “the only rock band in the world that doesn’t need music.”) Unlike most comedy albums, Firesign’s require—and reward—multiple hearings. As in the crowded films of Jacques Tati and Robert Altman, too much unusual activity occurs simultaneously to process on first encounter.

Like those filmmakers, Firesign found humor in the alienation caused by modern technology, and they too loved mundane awkwardness and coincidence: malapropism, mishearing, verbal hesitation, crosstalk, unintended repetition, and the juxtapositions that occur when you change channels on your TV or radio. The sense of disorientation was amplified by their frequent use of oblique punch lines, as when a preacher’s prayer suggests that his religion, like American society, treats pumping gas as a kind of sacrament: “Oh heavenly grid, help us bear up thy Standard, our Chevron flashing bright across the Gulf of Compromise…. Here in this Shell we call life…”

On Firesign’s records, satire and science fiction came together in an unsettling protest of American consumerism and militarism. Side 1 of their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969), begins with an ad for a used car dealership that’s interrupted by a customer who buys a vehicle on the spot. He sets off on a road trip that goes nowhere because of Zeno’s paradox about the impossibility of motion. The car’s climate control is its sole means of movement, and it eventually transports the driver—who has become a Black GI—to a jingoistic pageant where representatives of the establishment cheerfully reveal that the American dream is just a big con designed to provide cannon fodder and cheap labor for the military-industrial complex. The used car dealer returns as a drug dealer and then transforms into Molly Bloom reciting the end of her soliloquy from Ulysses, although her gender fluctuates wildly, as does that of the lover she remembers from her youth in Gibraltar.

Side 2 introduces Firesign’s best-known character—Nick Danger, Third Eye—in a pun-filled spoof of 1940s radio detective programs. The solution to Danger’s case is interrupted by Franklin Roosevelt announcing the Pearl Harbor attack and revealing that the US plans to “unconditionally surrender” to Japan. The dark joke on both sides of the record is that fascism wasn’t defeated in World War II, only domesticated. The album cover presents Firesign as a sort of Dada resistance force; the words ALL HAIL MARX LENNON, in faux-Cyrillic letters, appear around photos of Groucho and John.¹

Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (1970), Firesign’s best-selling record and its first album-length play, is something like a mix of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. It follows a famished stoner in a dystopian LA who is offered food through his TV set by a televangelist. After eating, the stoner somehow becomes an aged Hollywood actor who spends a sleepless night watching rebroadcasts of two of his old films: a 1940s high school comedy involving anticommunist paranoia and a Korean War drama. Most of the album consists of only the sound from the TV set as the actor flips between the movies, the plots of which become intertwined. Firesign returned often to the idea of channel surfing as a type of purgatory (or, as they later called it, “Hellivision”), and it remains a chilling theme in the smartphone age.

At the height of Firesign’s popularity a kind of craze developed in which high school and college boys would gather for communal listening sessions and later quote at length from the albums, as if signaling membership in a secret society. (Firesign’s penchant for inside jokes, repeated across different records, encouraged this clubbiness.) Counterculture magazines heralded them as prophets. “You’re going to be confronted with these guys a lot in the years ahead,” a Rolling Stone critic wrote in 1969, “and you’d better start getting used to them now so you won’t feel obsolete.”

Older writers didn’t want to miss out. Marshall McLuhan tried to organize a tour with Proctor and Bergman, who sometimes performed as a duo. According to Bergman, McLuhan was eager to convince the public that he was actually a comedian, not a staid academic. He may have been flattered that on Firesign’s first (and most conventional) album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him (1968), during a sketch about the hippies taking over and becoming nearly as oppressive as the squares, a warplane named the Enola McLuhan drops eight million hardcover copies of Naked Lunch on “the last stronghold of unhip resistance.” John Koethe, in a poem about his friendship with John Ashbery, recalled that somebody “late one night recited an entire side/Of a Firesign Theatre album from memory, and set John on that path,/To his friends’ subsequent dismay.”

Professors desperate to connect with students included Firesign’s work on syllabi, perhaps to teach them about modernist and postmodernist literary techniques such as stream of consciousness, collage, esoteric allusion, purposeful anachronism, and genre mash-ups. One New School seminar was titled “From Strindberg and Ibsen to the Firesign Theatre.” A reviewer in an academic journal deemed Don’t Crush That Dwarf “in its way as polysemous as Finnegans Wake.”

The rock critic Lester Bangs complained that comparisons like these had made Firesign pretentious and inscrutable. “If Cheech & Chong are Henry Miller,” Bangs told them during a frustrating 1974 interview, “then you would be James Joyce. But Cheech & Chong aren’t Henry Miller.” None of the guys in Firesign seemed to pick up on the insult, which may have proved Bangs’s point. The group liked to insist they weren’t comedians or satirists but surrealists, as if that somehow made them legitimate artists. Although they continued to create formally complex audio plays, their jokes became more insular, the targets of their satire less obvious. Listeners like Bangs didn’t want to work to figure out what Firesign was trying to say, especially when it seemed that they themselves sometimes didn’t know.

By 1975 the Firesign craze had ended. Columbia declined to renew their contract after nine albums, and newer comedy acts had emerged that bore similarities to Firesign but demanded less from audiences: Monty Python, Cheech and Chong, National Lampoon. The group kept performing on and off for decades, writing new material (some of it excellent), reworking their early albums into stage shows, and experimenting with new media such as video games (as early as 1979) and CD-ROM. But by the time of a 1981 reunion tour, Firesign’s members already knew they were a nostalgia act.

I started listening to Firesign around 2006 or 2007, when I was fifteen or sixteen, on the recommendation of a friend whose father had been a fan. I’ve struggled to persuade friends to give them a try. The appeal of immersive comic audio plays, dense with counterculture trivia and generally lacking clear punch lines, is simply lost on most people my age. Younger Firesign fans must find it even harder to convey the pleasures of the group’s albums to peers who are used to getting their comedy (not to mention cultural criticism) in quick hits on YouTube and TikTok.

Like me, Jeremy Braddock was not part of what he calls “the Firesign Theatre generation.” A professor of English at Cornell and the author of a book on modernist collecting practices, he started listening to Firesign in the early 1980s, when he was about twelve, after an uncle gave him their albums:

Their use of recorded sound and punning and/or literary language—the lowbrow and the highbrow jokes—were powerfully formative and probably led me to play music and do my own recordings, study literary modernism, and think critically and creatively about culture.

Braddock spent decades figuring out how best to write about Firesign. He tracked down discussions of their work in counterculture ephemera such as underground newspapers, fan newsletters, and punk zines. He looked through their papers in the Library of Congress and corresponded with Ossman and Proctor, the two surviving members. The result is the first book-length study of the group, Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums.

Firesign is also a renewed attempt to make their work safe for the graduate seminar, with the added challenge of introducing it to readers unfamiliar with the decades-old cultural references it contains. Braddock’s through line comes from the relatively recent field of media archaeology, which typically investigates technologies that fell out of use or were not widely adopted in order to cast light on forgotten or neglected societal possibilities. He claims that Firesign’s nine Columbia albums are primarily about “the transformation of society through its media” and that the group’s members were “media archaeologists avant la lettre.” Each of his five chapters is organized around a different technology—the long-playing record, radio, film, artificial intelligence, and television—and offers a short and incisive account of its history while exploring how Firesign engaged with it.

Braddock’s focus on technology and culture gives him an excellent means of discussing how Firesign’s albums were constructed and received. Yet as its subtitle warns, Firesign sprawls. For example, we’re told that Firesign was working on the MGM lot—writing the “electric western” film Zachariah (1971), loosely based on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha—shortly before the studio’s 1970 auction of its old costumes and props, which provided a subplot for Don’t Crush That Dwarf; that Proctor’s first wife, Sheilah Wells, was friends with Sharon Tate; that at Charles Manson’s trial for Tate’s murder, his lawyer wore a suit bearing a tag reading, “MGM Auction—Spencer Tracy”; and that the MGM executive responsible for the auction later mangled a more famous acid western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), featuring Bob Dylan in his first film role. Digressions like these are why the book’s back cover calls it a “cultural clearinghouse.”

It’s easy to understand the appeal of such a wide-ranging approach. Firesign’s work can be ingenious, but straightforward literary analysis of it gets exhausted pretty quickly. As literature, their albums are, frankly, thin. To read the transcripts collected in Marching to Shibboleth (2013)—a reissue of two volumes put out by Rolling Stone’s publishing arm, Straight Arrow Books, in 1972 and 1974—is to realize how much of the value of their work derives from what the critic Greil Marcus in his introduction calls “the hundreds of voices…at once perfect pitch [sic] and utterly scrambled.” Marcus, who has often discussed his love of Firesign, concedes that the magic of the records, even ones he knows well, gets lost in print: “Soon enough, as you read, you aren’t reading. You are losing your bearings.”

Braddock is well aware of the first wave of Firesign Studies, and like many of the rock critics and scholars who wrote about the Firesign Theatre half a century ago, he argues that the group’s work should be seen as literary. After all, they thought of it that way. Firesign’s members were the sort of erudite buffoons more common in the UK than in this country. Bergman and Proctor met in the late 1950s at Yale, where they were both involved in undergraduate theater. After college Bergman got a playwriting fellowship at the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin at the same time that Tom Stoppard was a fellow there. From 1959 to 1961 Ossman, who had graduated from Columbia, hosted a show on WBAI in New York City called The Sullen Art, on which he interviewed poets associated with the Beat movement; later he translated Neruda and Artaud. Austin, the sole Firesign member without an Ivy League degree (he studied at Bowdoin and UCLA but never graduated), was active in the LA theater scene and especially drawn to the theater of the absurd.

The group formed in late 1966 at KPFK, a listener-supported FM station in Los Angeles. Bergman hosted a late-night show there called Radio Free Oz, which was at the vanguard of counterculture sensibility. (Frequent topics included spiritualism and American Indian culture, and Bergman occasionally talked callers through bad acid trips.) Austin had taken over Ossman’s job as the station’s director of programming for drama and literature, and Proctor, a stage actor based in New York, got back in touch with Bergman during a trip out west after seeing a photo of him in the Los Angeles Free Press. The four performed together for the first time on a Radio Free Oz segment in which they improvised descriptions of movies screened at a fake film festival. Bergman devised the group’s name shortly before they went on the air, based on their astrological signs (an Aries, a Leo, and two Sagittariuses).

Although Braddock insists on Firesign’s literariness, he avoids outrageous claims about their stature. Instead, he shows how the group wedded their literary influences (Burroughs, Joyce, Kafka, Havel) to the lost art of radio drama. Firesign’s familiarity with old-time radio is most evident in Nick Danger, but their debt to the form went beyond gags about dramatic organ music, cheesy Foley sound, and under-rehearsed overacting. They were especially inspired by the Popular Front radio writer Norman Corwin, whose panoramic yet plainspoken scripts dealt with abstract subjects like astrophysics and ancient rhetoric. (Firesign lampooned Corwin’s we’re-all-in-this-together World War II propaganda on How Can You Be’s first side.)

The cliché that radio drama is a “theater of the mind” appealed to Firesign’s psychedelic tastes. “We wanted to produce the records,” Proctor said in the 1990s, “as if radio had continued into the modern era with the full force of energy it had during its so-called golden age.” As Braddock explains, avant-garde literary techniques helped them achieve this. So did their favorite comedy (the bizarre hipster monologues of Lord Buckley, the arch historical satire Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America) and the audio technology that the Beatles and other rock and pop artists were exploiting. For contractual reasons, Columbia had given Firesign unlimited studio time, and Braddock recreates many of their recording and mixing sessions, showing in extensive detail how their albums’ rich sound worlds were built.

Braddock writes at some length about Firesign’s politics but wisely doesn’t try to deduce a coherent program from their work. They were undoubtedly leftist but found their militant contemporaries’ rhetoric as risible as government propaganda. They enthusiastically used ethnic voices to criticize racial injustice, as Braddock delicately notes without excusing. They argued with unusual sincerity that nothing could be right in this country (which they typically referred to as “the United Snakes”) until some sort of honest reconciliation with American Indians was made, but they also suggested that such a reconciliation was impossible because it would involve armed uprising or voluntary surrender of property—actions practically no one was willing to take.

The group’s political satire was a few illogical steps removed from the daily news and much stranger than that of comparable comedians. For example, the Credibility Gap—which included Harry Shearer and Michael McKean, later of Spinal Tap, and which like Firesign started on LA radio—wrote a sketch that dramatized Richard Nixon’s nightmares just after the 1970 election to ridicule his insecurities and deficiencies. (The funniest aspect of the skit today may be its speculation that Spiro Agnew could have replaced Nixon at the top of the 1972 Republican presidential ticket.) By contrast, on I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus (1971) Firesign turned Nixon into a holographic computer program that responds to citizens’ questions with prerecorded banalities like “When you clock the human race with the stopwatch of history, it’s a new record every time.” (Braddock explains that the hologram president grew out of Proctor’s encounter with ELIZA, the first chatbot, at a work fair in LA.)

Bozos is about a totalitarian government that disguises itself as a theme park called the Future Fair in order to awe and pacify its citizens, many of whom, for unexplained reasons, dress as clowns. Visitors to the Future Fair, which was based on Disneyland and on brochures from the 1933 World’s Fair, are closely surveilled, told where to go and what to think. One authority figure says, “Understanding today’s complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But, there they are.” The only way to stop the buzzing is to fall in line. Firesign came up with a past for this future, imagining a scientific revolution in which Newton’s laws of motion were replaced by the axiom “If you push something hard enough, it will fall over.” At the Future Fair, force—and force alone—is the basis of truth, sovereignty, and industry.

The main character of Bozos destroys the hologram president by hacking into its software and posing an unanswerable question: “Why does the porridge bird lay his eggs in the air?”² It’s a tidy illustration of Firesign’s absurdist view of politics, later borne out in their mock presidential candidate George Papoon, who wore a brown paper bag over his head and ran in 1972 and 1976 on the slogan “Not Insane!” Braddock describes Firesign’s work as “dissident comedy,” and they were dissenting to just about everything, for the same reason all great satirists do: savage indignation at greed and folly.

Firesign covers nearly everything that made the group’s albums possible and created an audience for them. It provides sharp interpretations of Firesign’s side projects and later Columbia records, which always deserved wider recognition. (Everything You Know Is Wrong, a 1974 send-up of New Age hokum and the album that Lester Bangs found baffling, is a favorite of mine.) It also explains the wider forces that caused Firesign’s audience to disperse: the decline of the underground press, including the reformatting of Rolling Stone as a general lifestyle magazine; the commercialization and censoring of FM radio in the early 1970s, which meant sympathetic DJs could no longer play full Firesign albums (or even parts of albums); and the rise of television as “the most important platform for comedy in the United States,” especially with the premiere of SNL and the launch of HBO in 1975.

But Firesign largely avoids a major aspect of the group’s work. In his preface, Braddock writes, “I had been at enough midnight screenings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to know that I did not want to restage all the jokes, and anyway, the albums are about much more than jokes.” That’s true, but a close examination of Firesign’s oddball humor wouldn’t have been nearly as tedious as Braddock supposes. He might have done for Firesign what Malcolm Turvey did in Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism (2019), which minutely and brilliantly analyzes the director’s gags in order to explicate his larger themes.

Despite the Firesign Theatre’s own misgivings about being seen as merely comedians, jokes were the crux of their work and the most important vehicle for their acerbic worldview. Over the past seventeen years Taylor Jessen, Firesign’s official archivist, has released more than a hundred hours of previously unavailable material, much of which shows their skill as comedy writers. To take two examples, Live at the Magic Mushroom (2021) collects eleven half-hour plays that Firesign performed as part of Radio Free Oz between October 1967 and January 1968. The best of these put a hippie spin on the breakneck pace and relentless punning of The GoonShow. Not Insane 1980! (2024) contains the dozens of segments Firesign performed on NPR during the 1980 presidential primaries and general election; many sketches could have come out of a late-night talk show writers’ room. Listeners who find Firesign’s typical style opaque and unfunny may find themselves laughing (or appreciatively groaning) at these works.

In an epilogue, Braddock briefly addresses Firesign’s legacy. He discusses the Church of the SubGenius, an anticonsumerist performance art group that blurred the line between fiction and reality; Negativland, the experimental musicians and sound collagists who espoused “culture jamming,” or interfering with media discourse and dissemination; and hip-hop DJs like Madlib who sampled Firesign’s records for their “parodies of whiteness.” It’s notable that none of the successors he discusses is explicitly comic.

But there are plenty of comedians who have “investigat[ed] media as a…source of authoritarian politics,” as Braddock says Firesign did, and found humor there. I don’t know if the British satirist Chris Morris was directly influenced by the Firesign Theatre, but his radio shows for the BBC are as close in spirit to Firesign’s albums as anything I’ve heard. On the Hour (1991–1992), a parody news show, is full of official-sounding voices spouting surreal nonsense with complete confidence. Blue Jam (1997–1999), a pitch-black sketch and music show, depicts life as a constant, banal confrontation with one’s powerlessness. Like Firesign’s work, On the Hour and Blue Jam are deranged and indignant, and they reveal how easily we’re hoodwinked and cowed into accepting what the loud, confident voices around us tell us to believe. It’s a deeply disturbing way of seeing our world, but still, you can’t help but laugh.