Classic comedy album a Firesign of the times
Desperate times call for desperate responses in popular culture. But while the controversy, protests, paranoia, and confusion sown by the first few weeks of the Trump administration is of historic proportions, it’s a little early in the curve for the creative community to have answered back in full. Until that time — and it may be weeks — one tempting choice is to go forward into the past.
Thankfully, I have the ticket. What would you say to a forgotten satirical masterpiece that takes place in a parallel America, one where we lost World War II (we were fighting Fascism, remember?), where television has replaced reality as the organizing principle of people’s lives, and where resistance isn’t even possible as long as you’re hooked up to the 24-seven entertainment machine?
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” a 1970 LP by the four-man comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre. Elected into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2006, the record is 47 years old and plays like it was recorded yesterday.
Most of you remember the Firesigns, if you remember them at all, as that hippie comedy act your best friend’s acidhead older brother was into in the late ’60s. This has not been to the benefit of the group’s reputation. Based in Los Angeles and made up of David Ossman, Philip Proctor, Peter Bergman, and Phil Austin — the last two now sadly deceased — The Firesign Theatre specialized in conceptual narrative comedy that interwove goofball surrealism with diamond-hard social criticism. They’re perhaps best known for “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger” (1969), a dandy but relatively straightforward private-eye parody off their second album, and also for “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus” (1971), which only predicted virtual reality, computer hacking, and the surveillance state.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater/dance/2017/02/02/classic-comedy-album-firesign-times/bAMOFs0Q93fzblU9BMWxMJ/story.html
I feel like we're living in the Firesign Theatre universe these days.
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