In Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums, Jeremy Braddock explores and celebrates the humour of the Firesign Theatre, an American comedy troupe founded in Los Angeles in the mid 1960s and active for the better part of the next five decades. However, they did their most inventive work under the zeitgeist of the 1960s. Writing as both a scholar and fan, Braddock discusses the Firesign Theatre in relation to cultural critics like Mikhail Bakhtin, Marshall McLuhan, Raymond Williams and Jonathan Sterne, and informs the reader that the best way to listen to the troupe was in a small group of likeminded countercultural individuals. ‘Oh’, he adds, ‘and they sounded great when you were stoned’ (p. xii). These playful and welcomed injections, sprinkled throughout the text, in no way detract from the importance of the study. To be sure, as many, including W.C. Fields, have said, ‘Comedy is serious business’.

Braddock divides his study into five chapters with an introduction (‘Liner Notes’) and conclusion (‘Coda’). Each of the first four chapters focuses on a single album, one of the Firesign Theatre's first four albums, and the specific media source that most impacted that album. Chapter 5 discusses six albums, including solo releases, from 1972 to 1975, the year Columbia Records dropped them. Although the Firesigns continued working and recording for decades, Braddock's strategy not to study the troupe's later releases (some 30 albums, including radio broadcasts, live performances, compilations, solo releases and outtakes) does not detract from the study. Their techniques were well defined by 1975, and Braddock's book gives us an approach easily applicable to later releases.

Chapter 1 considers Firesign Theatre's first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him (1968), as both a literary work and rock album. Braddock draws on Bakhtin's definition of the novel as an essentially comedic form presenting a dissenting and gruesome world turned upside down, ‘a mix of varied and opposing voices … reflecting in all its fullness the … multiple voices of a given culture’ (p. 16) and points out Electrician's allusions to William S. Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Antonin Artaud, Václav Havel and Franz Kafka. However, while placing the Firesign Theatre in the literary world, he also situates them in the rock culture of the late 1960s, one of his most revealing contextualisations that runs throughout the book. Indeed, Columbia Records promoted them as ‘the only rock band in the world that doesn't need music’ (p. 169). Like many rock bands, the Firesign Theatre was a foursome (David Ossman, Phil Austin Peter Bergman, Philip Proctor – all born under fire signs), who first gained exposure on the nascent freeform FM radio, took the record album as their art form and received coverage in rock magazines like Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy! and Creem, where Lester Bangs called them ‘masters of Voice’ (p. 16). Like the Beatles, with whom Braddock frequently compares them, the Firesign Theatre took advantage of developing recording technology. Waiting for the Electrician was recorded on four tracks, like Sgt. Pepper's, and In the Next World, You're on Your Own (1975) on 24 tracks. Their use of multitracks was innovative for comedy albums and led to ‘densely multitracked information-heavy forty-minute fictions’ (p. xi), which reward relistening.

In Chapter 2, with its focus on How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All (1969), Braddock draws on the concept of media archaeology, which he uses to greater or lesser extent throughout the book to construct ‘technical genealogies and countergenealogies’ (p. 60) and to explain the troupe's depth and innovation. On this second album, for example, they merge sound effects and programming (like Orson Welles's War of the Worlds, 1938) from classic radio (approximately the 1930s to the 1950s) with 1960s psychedelia, counterculture radio, and some two dozen references to the Beatles (p. 72). Braddock takes a similar approach in Chapter 3 when he discusses what many consider their masterpiece Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (1970). He explains how Hollywood cinema serves as the ‘formal model for the album and one of its key subjects’ (p. 96), which the comedians use to comment on the 1970 Kent State shootings, games shows, televangelism and much more. In addition, Braddock interprets the album's protagonist, George Tirebiter, a former child actor who watches himself on late-night television, as illustrative of Raymond Williams's concept of mobile privatisation. Tirebiter buries his sense of alienation from the external world and relieves himself of ‘the privatized isolation of domestic space’ (p. 130) through the sounds and images on his perpetually turned-on television, a ploy both funny and tragic.

In Chapter 4, one of the most insightful chapters, Braddock presents I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus (1971) as a ‘premonitory allegory’ of technological takeover (p. 131). Set in a dystopian, futuristic amusement park and drawing from the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and ELIZA, the mid-1960s chatbot, the album warns of a world dominated by holograms, robots and artificial intelligence. Braddock sees Bozos as a ‘dystopian futuristic comedy album’ (p. 136), reflecting the counterculture's ‘grim uneasiness’ with the corporatisation of rock music, uncertainty about the antiwar efforts, and suspicion of ‘intensified government surveillance’ (p. 137). Braddock's reference to the Firesigns as ‘jocose Cassandras’ seems especially apt here (p. 200). Chapter 6 discusses multiple albums in relation to television, the media form which, because of its constant state of flux and instability during the early years of Firesign Theater, 1967–1975, provided the humourists with a constant source of material and satire. The Coda considers their career-long lack of television and film exposure, their ‘dethroning’ by Creem (p. 202), the development of a fan community and its publications, and their ‘[extensive sampling] by many of the most recondite DJs in the history of hip hop’ (p. 202), an overstatement.

Before hearing of The Electromagnetic History, I had not thought of the Firesign Theatre in years. Yet this compelling study had me listening to them again. I found Braddock's analysis of their inanity, innovation, satire, and especially, appropriation and adaptation of other media and art forms to be perceptive and well grounded. Braddock delivers his analysis with clarity, precision, and, as the title suggests, at least a dose of humour.