The Firesign Theatre
Surviving members of the Firesign Theatre paying tribute to the late Peter Bergman on April 21, 2012; left to right: Austin, Ossman, Proctor
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| Formation | July 24, 1966 |
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| Dissolved | March 9, 2012 |
| Type | Theatre group |
| Purpose | Comedy |
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Membership
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| Website | www |
The Firesign Theatre was an American comedy troupe comprising Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor. Their brand of surrealistic humor is best known through their record albums, which acquired an enthusiastic following in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The troupe began as live radio performers in Los Angeles on radio stations KPPC-FM and KPFK during the mid-1960s. The group's name stems in part from astrology, because the membership encompasses all three "fire signs": Aries (Austin), Leo (Proctor), and Sagittarius (Bergman and Ossman).
The Firesign Theatre employs a stream of consciousness style that includes direct references to movies, radio, TV, political figures, and other cultural sources, intermingled with sound effects and bits of music. The resulting stories—including the theft of a high school, a fair of clowns and holograms, and aliens who use hemp-smoking to turn people into crows—border on psychedelia, an effect intensified by the frequent appearance of mock "advertisements" satirizing real products.
The Firesign approach to comedy was strongly influenced by The Goon Show. All four original Firesign members have spoken of their admiration for this show. Said Ossman:
We all listened to The Goon Show, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, at various times in our lives. We heard a lot of those shows. They impressed us when we started doing radio ourselves, because they sustained characters in a really surreal and weird kind of situation for a long period of time. They were doing that show for 10 years, all the way through the 1950s. So we were just listening to them at the end. It was that madness and the ability to go anywhere and do anything and yet sustain those funny characters. So when we first did written radio, where we would sit down and write half hour skits and do them once a week, which we did in the fall of 1967, we did things that were imitative of The Goon Show and learned a lot of voices from them and such.
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