Firesign Theatre’s ‘Dope Humor of the Seventies’ | Hacker News Reader

Firesign Theatre’s ‘Dope Humor of the Seventies’

dangerousminds.net

27 pointsblegh12 comments

Word to the wise: TFA overlooks this, but Firesign Theatre's humor didn't end in the seventies. Probably my FT favorite album is Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death, which came out in 1998 and is their darkly optimistic take on the millennium. It's just as profound and multilayered as their earlier work, and to someone not of the hippie generation it's waaay more relevant.

Another standout is Eat or Be Eaten, which is from 1985 and is entirely about video games. FT didn't milk their hippie/pothead schtick, they changed a lot with the times and their later work is still very much worth checking out.

"Hi friends, Ralph Spoilsport here to tell you that everybody must die, but you don't have to be there when it happens!"

I had mixed feelings about GMIOGMD when it was released. I didn't like how self-referential it was, the reintroduction of Ralph Spoilsport being a great example. The album eventually grew on me, but it lacks the timeless charm of their 70s efforts.

There is some self-reference, but I suppose I always saw that as fan service. Later in their careers FT did a lot of live shows, where die-hard audiences would call-and-response the famous lines, so to me the presence of self-referential gags always felt like a big part of the FT experience.

But to each his own - quid malmborg in plano as they say.

A camp counselor introduced a bunch of us to "Nick Danger" one summer back in the '70's, and it was instant infatuation for me. I bought all of their albums I could find and listened to them all the time. No drugs involved at all, on my side at least. Their love of language play, political stances, satire and parody, and obvious skill and love of what they did made Firesign Theater amazing.

FT is great even without drugs, but while high I found them even more hilarious, the sensory aspects of their performance were way more effective at transporting me in to the worlds they were conjuring up, and I felt I made a lot more connections in the many references they were making.

Pot has often had a similar effect for me with other comedies, but the multisensory, multi-level nature of Firesign Theater brings the whole experience to another level that's rarely been matched by anything else.

I envy pot heads who are just discovering Firesign Theater for the first time. You've got a lot of laughter ahead of you.

And this reminds me of an interview I just heard with the actress that played the little girl in Manos: The Hands of Fate. She said she and her friends were huge Firesign Theater fans in high school, and would exasperate their other friends by quoting Firesign Theater all the time.

The 1970's FT material isn't as funny to me as it was decades ago. Blazing Saddles is like that too.

I'm not criticizing. I can still see genius but I don't engage with it the same way (partially due to raising kids and subsiding into their world).

It has me puzzling why some humor (eg: Monty Python, Marx Bros) seems to retain it's universal appeal while some doesn't.

"I think we're all bozos on this bus" is the first recorded hack iirc.

Fascinating - I was ready to downvote the idea that this was the first recorded hack (MIT students had been doing hacks many decades or perhaps even the better part of a century earlier) but reading up on "I think we're all bozos on the bus" [0] I believe you mean the first fictional hacker in film or video, which could well be the case.

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AudioPlay/IThinkWereA...

This was my introduction to FT, I was blown away. I must have listened to it over 100 times. Thanks for the memory poke, off to find a copy to listen to.

My dad introduced me to FT; they are amazing. You really need to pay attention though; there's a lot going on, and rarely are you hit over the head with what's going on.

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