Somebody please explain this to me

As Smart as Comedy Gets - The Firesign Theatre on Whidbey Island

 

I conjure up the Firesign Theatre at Whidbey Island Center for the Arts

Phil Proctor, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Phil Austin

1/08/10

It took a walk in the rain to a bus to a train to a walk in the rain to a ferry to Whidbey Island to another bus to see the Firesign Theatre perform. Along the way, I discovered that a relaxed and certainly prerecorded "Doors Closing" has replaced "All Aboard!" as the announcement of preference before the train takes off in the year 2010. It was a beautiful trip, the Sounder train from the King Street Station in downtown Seattle hugs the coast north to the ferry terminal in Mukilteo, passing the Edgewater Inn, the entrance to Hempfest and the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, and Myrtle Edwards Park and wham,  a train going in the other direction, blocking your view of Magnolia and the bluffs, passing the locks, crossing a salmon ladder, water, bridges, water, more bridges, the Golden Gardens, the marina, winter, dark early, hard to differentiate between sky and land, all in the rain, a whacked out watercolor of mayhem occasionally blitzed by car lights into fragments of kaleidoscopic splendor, intensifying my total bogglement that the original Firesign Theatre, the comedic masters of surrealism and anarchy, are still together after 43 years, will be performing tonight, and I'm lucky enough to get to see them.

The train allows me to plug in and log on. I Google the Firesign Theatre on a train to the Firesign Theatre and discover to my horror that a lot of people don't know the difference between the words THEATER and THEATRE, so let's get this over with. It's not just one of those British vs. American spelling differences for the same word like "favor" and "favour," the two words actually mean something different. When you enter the theater, you're going into a building. When you enter the theatre, you're going into a profession. This is important to know if you're going to see the Firesign Theatre, four performers creating a theatrical event, but thinking you're going to see the Firesign Theater, a building used to put on theatrical presentations. You can have a "theatrical" experience outside a "theater," but "theaters" would be ridiculous places if there weren't any "theatre."

Further diving into the Firesign online reveals vast universes of fandom and minutia. The troll in me wants to start a not-so-raging debate concerning whether The Firesign Theatre or Monty Python are the Beatles of comedy. Never one to lose an argument with myself, fully believing it's Firesign all the way, I am unsettled to discover there are arguments to be made both ways. Monty Python was British. So were the Beatles. There are only four members of the Firesign Theatre. There were only four Beatles. Someone less twitchy might just call it quits right there but not I.

Born out of radio, where nothing is more evil than dead space, the boys learned to just keep talking and talking and talking, each capable of a multitude of voices, getting precise and calculated and subtle and over-the-top with references meant for MENSA, their mastery of recording finally culminating in genuine theatrical events for the mind.

Released in 1970, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers is the first concept comedy album meant to be heard from the beginning of side one to the end of side two and is easily the Firesign's Sgt. Pepper. "Their next release, I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus is easily their Magical Mystery Tour," says Fred Further of Further Analogies 'R' Us, specialists in dead horse beating.

The Firesign were certainly the first to use the simple sound effect of changing channels to take you from here to somewhere else. I don't know if any of the Pythons have ever fessed up to listening to the Firesign Theatre but their surreal transitions were Firesign all the way, making one imagine an alternative history where Terry Gilliam never makes it abroad and teams up with the Firesign Theatre instead of the Pythons. (Note to self. Start a petition at petitions.com demanding Terry Gilliam direct the film version of I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus.)

Before the Firesign Theatre, recordings of "theatre" were actual multi-record box sets of audio recordings of Broadway plays of which, I admit, I owned quite a few, and you can file under deep obscuradalia the fact the audio version of Luv, the Broadway play by Murray Schisgal starring Alan Arkin, was much funnier than Luv, the movie starring Jack Lemmon (but got Arkin the part of the lead in The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming anyway).

Before the Firesign Theatre, comedy albums were Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby and Lenny Bruce and Allan Sherman, comedians being funny in what were essentially recorded stage shows. Firesign Theatre albums showed up just as stoners were discovering the insane pleasure of listening to Sgt. Pepper with the headphones on, picking up every nuance. For the very first time, there were COMEDY albums worth listening to with the headphones on, which means the Firesign Theatre did for comedy albums precisely what the Beatles did for rock. Listening to them for the first time was revelatory, comedy was too weak a word, comedy just one of many things the Firesign Theatre embraced. If I ran the record store, I would have filed them under Irony or Surrealism. It was mindfuck comedy, the jokes and sound effects and music and voices combining in such a way as to almost but not quite add up to a visual picture that made the slightest shred of sense. Two people listening to the same track on headphones with their eyes closed were sure to conjure up entirely different retina movies since it's all from a non-linear dream state. When everyone on the bus in Bozos goes "whoa," you're forced to picture SOMETHING that made them do it, and your picture can't be the same as mine. Deprived of visuals, the Firesign create theatre that dares you to figure out what's going on, where you have to PAY ATTENTION because missing one little thing could make it all incomprehensible.*

* Not that hearing the whole thing perfectly will make something comprehensible that wasn't meant to be so in the first place. Another section my mythical record store owner might file his Firesign records is under Symbolism, a theatre where it's possible to read everyone's thoughts and there's no turning back, wherever they take you, whether a missing Sherlock Holmes episode or an amusement park in the future, it's all a dream within a dream within a dream, a world where the mere mention of the words "Hideo Knutt's Boltadrome" sends paroxysms of pleasure through the cerebral cortex, where Burroughs' random cut-up act reigns supreme, albums full of precognition. (When the announcer in Bozos instructs everyone to let the air out of their shoes, what was completely ridiculous in 1971 would make a modern listener just think they were all wearing Air Jordans.)

In this video, Proctor and Bergman describe the LA show, which seems very much the one I saw.

Reality Hacking with the Firesign Theatre's Proctor & Bergman from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

Part II

So here I am, in the lobby, before the show, an hour early, typing away, wondering whether seeing them in person will completely fuck up the magic, after all, I'm used to hearing them as characters I've created in my mind over years of intense listening.

Four microphones. Four chairs. That's it.

They come out, start talking, and you realize the Firesign can stretch a joke like taffy, way past the feasibility point, a game show where contestants have to guess what disease they were just injected with or die, a disappearing high school, a confused teenager and his 70-year-old best friend Mudhead, an entire synthesized Shakespeare play with sexual innuendo the Bard himself would have stolen in a flash had he been there, the train-of-thought school of comedy brought to you by Ralph Spoilsport of Spoilsport Motors, with so many lefts and rights you need a cosmicomic GPS to keep your sense of magnetic north, impossible to laugh at what's happening when you're just catching up with what they said five seconds ago.

The show had few sound effects other than the ones coming out of their mouths, and all used strangely. One of them stretched out his arm, followed by a sound effect of a glass breaking, followed by another of them saying "he knocked over a sound effect." In one bit, a bunch of characters all had monikers that were the names of obscure streets in Hollywood, hilarious to me because I once lived in Hollywood but which must have meant diddly to the audience on Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound of the Great Northwest. Another bit, I'm sorry, you won't get it unless you've read Ulysses.

It was a completely inspirational experience, only modified by the hapless schmuck sitting next to me who left during intermission. Let's eavesdrop on his brain for a second, shall we?

Let's say you'd never heard of the Firesign Theatre but you lived on an island and your wife kept insisting you needed some culture in your life so you allowed yourself to be dragged to a "Center for the Arts" to witness the reunion of four "comedians" whose albums you'd never heard. The first ten minutes of the act in front of you would have been mind-boggling incomprehensible and impossible to follow, no less mysterious than the cascades of laughter from the audience at things that not only weren't funny but made absolutely no sense at all. Finally, when it settled down into something resembling what you previously might have considered to be an actual "comedy routine," with a premise you understood and punchlines that were tied to the premise, WHOOSH, they're off again into verbal lalaland, obviously quoting from sacred text you've never read but fully understood by the sold-out crowd around you who get it all, every pun and conundrum. You're like Penny trying to keep up with the major geniuses next door, but making Sheldon and Leonard look like corncob salesmen, no dumbing it down for the prime-time crowd, give 'em Sartre with a dash of Ionesco, venturing into surreality is never casual, you could end up anywhere, your thoughts start to wander, what the fuck, you fell asleep, or did you?, are those guys still talking, geez, what the hell are they talking about, you thought it was a game show but now it seems to be the trenches in WWI, it's like you're an alien tuning in on transmissions from earth but unable to lock in on a signal for more than a minute, bopping from one reality to another, where the focus, get this, isn't on the reality of any particular scene but upon the transition.

Yeah, I couldn't blame him for leaving. More room for me.

People who don't get it don't realize that's the point, you don't get them, they get you, right where they want you, they've got your preconceptions in their crosshairs ready to blast them to smithereens because Everything You Know is Wrong, that's right, absolutely everything, which in my case I know to be completely correct, I know nothing, I just remember things, and not particularly well or in the right order, so don't let them fool you, it's you who are deceived. (Get it? No? Good, you're not supposed to, which only proves my point.)

Phil Austin says "The Firesign Theatre writes communally. Every word goes through four heads for approval. We therefore write very slowly. Our energy level is intense. Grown men leave the room when we fight with each other. Nothing is sacred."

With wordplay so fast and furious you can't possibly keep up, the Firesign Theatre are the Cirque du Intellect, the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle of comedy, four brains moving four times as fast as yours, absolutely, no contest, as smart as comedy gets.

Martian Space Party: Firesign Theatre part 2

Martian Space Party: Firesign Theatre part 2 from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

Firesign Theatre
Upcoming Live Performances
 
Kirkland Jan 22 & Jan 23
(7:30 PM, festival seating, arrive early)
 
Tacoma Jan 24
(3:00 PM and 7:30 PM)
 

Continue to the Firesign Theatre website...

Tales from the House of Glitch #4: Cirque du Glitch

Cirque du Glitch

 

Hank couldn't remember what his glitch was or even that he had a glitch at all. All he knew was the TV wasn't working and no matter what button he pushed, he couldn't get it to KIRO for the news, it just wasn't working, he was sure it was the television, he didn't know anything about televisions. Technology was the glitch Hank couldn't remember since his stroke, along with his name, rank, and social security number. He simply didn't know what to do so he went outside, on a rainy day, to sit on the porch watching the wet people flow by to the free coffeeshop across the street, Mosaic, the one run by the church, like a Starbucks with no prices on the menu, just a donation box, free WIFI for the lord and all that, he couldn't remember if he'd ever been there or not but it seemed to be popular. He sat and watched the outside world for no other reason than his TV was broken and reality was the only other thing on.

 

Gary was on his way to Mosaic because the furniture was WAY better than at the House of Glitch, nice comfy leather chairs on nice carpets next to fake fireplaces. When Gary woke up every morning, the first thing he had to do was figure out someplace to go other than the House of Glitch, which was where he was when he woke up. He didn't really have anywhere to go other than OUT OF THE HOUSE, even though it was raining, so out came the scarf and the umbrella and the laptop in the backpack for a sojourn up the block.

 

"Hey!"

 

"Huh?"

 

"You know anything about television?"

 

Hoo boy. Too complicated. So many potential answers. Which one was this old man looking for, from his porch, across the street from Mosaic, where Gary wanted to get out of the rain, when he remembered where he was. This was Seattle, where you could eat or drink on any bus or train in the public transportation system without a bother, where there was no gum on the seats, and where everyone said "Thank you" to the bus driver upon disembarking. He remembered every reason, past or present, that he had admired the city of Seattle for its simple civility. It was the most tolerant society he had ever participated in and he liked it. What was he going to do now, be RUDE to this poor old man, adrift on the sea of technology, probably senile, shouting out to strangers passing by, thinks the TV is broken even though he probably just hit the wrong button. Suddenly, Gary saw it as more than a kind thing to do but his solemn patriotic duty to solve the problem of Hank and the television.

 

He looked to his right. Comfy ol' Mosaic and a cuppa Joe. He looked to his left. Some old man was inviting him into his house. Throwing precaution to the wind, shaking his head, he climbed the stairs to the patio, the old man in a walker, an American Flag on the side of his shirt and an old Bell Telephone insignia on the front, obviously retired, a vet, on his own, Gary shook out his umbrella, folded it up and left it on the porch as Hank opened his front door and let him in.

 

Immaculate and clean, old heavy furniture full of windows and knick knacks, no, not knick knacks, figurines, tiny and precisely displayed, ancient and particularly fitting for the time and place where Hank left his mind.

 

"See? It doesn't work."

 

The screen was blue so Gary knew the TV worked. First things first. Had the old man just changed the TV from channel 3? Gary found the TV remote, pressed 3, and up popped some cable channel from the cable box to the left of the TV. He grabbed the cable remote and changed channels, making sure the volume control worked, there good as new, see yuh.

 

Gary left that porch damn proud of himself. Not only did he remember not to forget his umbrella, he had done a good deed for a random stranger, a deed much simpler than he had anticipated before accepting the challenge, but a good deed nonetheless. For the first time in a long time, he truly felt himself to be a good person, a Seattleite, a man of the people, a mensch.

 

Gary settled into his comfy chair at Mosaic with a fresh well-made infusion of hot black Seattle coffee, set up his laptop, logged onto the lord's WIFI, got his mail, and mulled. He had just had a micro-adventure, and he'd recently taken a seminar in "micro-fiction" at the University branch of the public library, a new literary craze where you grab miniature stories from everyday life and paint a quick portrait. This was perfect.

 

He opened a new window and started typing... "Hank couldn't remember what his glitch was or even that he had a glitch at all." Gary never found out what the old man's name was so he figured "Hank" would do, and if not, what?, you never heard of SEARCH and REPLACE? "All he knew was the TV wasn't working and no matter what button he pushed, he couldn't get it to KIRO for the news," he typed next.

 

This is going good, Gary thought. I'm on a roll, but he stopped typing, right there in the middle of a sentence, like Hemingway told him to, and grabbed a swig of luxury along with a freshly buttered croissant. In order to accomplish this, his eyes had to leave the screen and wander. Oh shit. Across the room, at the entrance to Mosaic, was the old guy, the one he'd just recently named Hank, walking up to some other dude with a beard and saying "I'm looking for a guy."

 

"Hoo boy. Too complicated. So many potential answers." thought the dude with a beard who actually said nothing.

 

"I think that's him."

 

And so the dude with a beard, whom you now realize you're going to have to come up with a name for, has written himself into the story and is leading the limping old phone company vet in the walker over to your territory, where you're still trying to write what happened ten minutes ago and he's actually INTERRUPTING your getting it all down, the whole story of your kindness to a stranger, only fictionalized, the bastard, what the hell does he want now?

 

"This is who you were looking for?" asked the dude in the beard.

 

"Yep, that's him," said the old man previously known as Hank.

 

Gary stopped typing, stood up, and tried to explain to the dude in the beard what was happening, as though the dude in the beard were the only way out of this mess.

 

"It stopped working again," said Hank, previously known as the old man, because Gary named him Hank and that's it.

 

The old man looked at him in pity. The dude in the beard looked at him with pity. "I am not going back to this guy's fucking house just because he hit the wrong button on his remote," Gary thought, "what, now every time he gets a thorn in his paw I'm the one gotta pull it out? Be gone! I've got writing to do."

 

"Just make sure the TV is on channel 3," Gary actually said to Hank as Mort, the recently renamed bearded dude, led Hank out of Mosaic and to the sidewalk, returning quickly to his own latte with pumpkin.

 

The old man, who remained nameless outside of Gary's story, had not brought an umbrella. He only had to make it across the rainy street, but it was one of those unique baroque intersections that Gary loved, with a simple round garden island planted smack dab in the middle of the intersection to discourage speeding, but the guy in the U-Haul didn't see it coming, swerved too fast and fell over in the slippery street, spilling an entire load of figurines on top of Hank, no, Leon, who died instantly, but whose soul migrated to the figurine picked up by Gary from the gutter on the way home and left on top of the refrigerator in the House of Glitch where Leon's ghost met Angie's ghost, much to his regret.

 

Moral: Fuck figurines.

Tales from the House of Glitch #3: The Unfriending

The Unfriending

Alicia took the WIFI for an extra $40 a month but skipped the cable, figuring if there was ever anything on TV that she needed to see, she could find it on the internet and watch it on her laptop, and she was right. On the internet she found much more than mere cable could offer. She found companionship and a sense of community that only got deeper the more she never left the room. She had a major glitch, as did everyone in the House of Glitch, where those without glitches need not show their smug, self-satisfied faces. The internet was Alicia's major glitch. She barely made it to the bathroom, holding it in for as long as she could before putting her online on hold and venturing out of her cozy room into the common hallway to the common bathroom where she might run into someone common with their own major glitch and have to strike up a conversation when really, OMG, she just wanted to pee, she really didn't want to actually talk to someone, not someone with a glitch, not without spell-check, not without the ability to EDIT before SENDING. Speaking involved communication she couldn't take back so she preferred to not even try. Her only real friends were online.

Ed couldn't remember ever friending Alicia on Facebook but it was obviously a mistake. How could he have been so stupid.

At first, all his friends were his actual friends, people he knew, or people who knew people he knew, with an actual verified degree of separation between Ed and everyone on his friend list. Then strangers started showing up, people asking to be friended but with whom he didn't share a friend. He was a popular writer who decided to let in people who were clearly fans of his work and who didn't seem like serial killers, but it was with trepidation because he didn't actually KNOW them. Who knew how they would behave. Friending them meant letting their comments post to his page. He had suffered the horrors of friending two old friends, exes, who were horrified to find themselves back in contact with each other, but what was he to do when both requested to friend him? He had to say yes, which turned out to be a bad idea. Neither wanted each others comments to show up on the other's pages so they both unfriended Ed, who found himself with two less Facebook friends. It hurt.

He had crafted his Facebook friend list to include his version of an intellectual elite, the very people he'd like to materialize into a dinner party at the Ritz where he was the host, introducing raconteurs and wits to each other, then sitting back in astonishment at the quality of the repartee.

One day, it happened, a casual comment had somehow turned into a miracle of banter, a dream conversation about a glitch where everyone got the joke and was riffing on it as if it were real, the ultimate back-and-forth repartee Facebook was meant for, and everyone was participating, even famous people on his friend list who never posted anything. He had gathered just the right combination of literates who ALL got the joke and immediately responded with flash and hilarity, like a New Yorker cartoon where a couple of scientists are convulsing with laughter over some formula that takes up the whole blackboard, in on a joke no one else would ever get but them.

Except for Alicia. She didn't get the joke. She thought it was a serious conversation. The ghost of Alicia's dead mother told her to "Go ahead and post, you're swimming with the big boys, you know what they're talking about, you've got something intelligent to add to the discussion, I mean why not," nagged her mother, "maybe you'll meet someone nice." Alicia responded to Ed's Facebook page as though the conversation were serious and the entire concept being batted back and forth was actually possible instead of completely ridiculous figments of the imaginations of the hand selected group of VERY clever people who were Ed's Facebook friends.

Ed and his friends couldn't believe it. To them, Alicia was a cyber version of Penny, the ditzy next door neighbor of Sheldon and Leonard on The Big Bang Theory, a layman clearly incapable of following their BRILLIANT train of thought. All Ed's Facebook friends could do was make fun of her, and make fun of her they did, reply after reply, hilarious, scathing, wicked, entertaining to everyone but Alicia, who perceived herself as being the butt of all these jokes, not realizing being the butt of a joke can be a good thing if you just play along but she couldn't, she hadn't studied improv, she didn't know the "yes, and" rule, she was in too deep, she couldn't keep up, she had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, she tried to be cute about it, sent an emoticon that clearly represented "aw shucks," but they made fun of the emoticon, piling it on, when suddenly, there it was, in her status. Ed had unfriended her.

After Alicia was found catatonic by one of her glitchy neighbors and removed from the House of Glitch to a state mental institution, the neighbor stole her computer and logged onto her Facebook page, saw the unfriending, and sent Ed a message from his own Facebook page telling him what happened to Alicia. Ed felt so guilty he refriended her. "Unfriending someone is sort of harsh," he said. "I know how she felt, but it was the easiest way to remove her comments from my discussions. Blame Facebook."

Moral: Never listen to your parents.

Tales from the House of Glitch #2: The Arsonist

The Arsonist

Arnold knew who did it. It was one of those kids, the ones who hung out on the porch, like that one who kept lighting his lighter and putting it out, obviously a flame freak, like the one who started the fire in the dumpster, just for kicks, fire department and everything, they never caught the guy, but he knew who did it. It was one of those kids, the ones that hung out with Jamie, the guy in the attic, in the primo spot, the only room with a view, and he'd been there for years, always with the good bud, maybe even a dealer, which would make sense, that they all got high before setting the dumpster on fire. They musta thunk it was real funny, well hah hah, how do you like them apples? He knew Jamie would tell him who started the fire because it was his fault for getting them high before they must have set the dumpster on fire, even though Jamie was in Ballard when it happened and it was only when coming home on the 44 he saw the fire trucks and the cops. Jamie didn't know what happened and took no responsibility for what anyone else did upon leaving the House of Glitch, stoned or not, but Arnold didn't see it that way. It was one of his favorite dumpsters to dive, ground zero for one of Seattle's finest collectors of things other people threw away, and if that preoccupation occasionally warranted actually stepping into the container to retrieve something, so be it. The hapless pranksters just wanted to see flames but had instead angered Shiva, goddess of dumpsters, the holy land had been violated and the heathens must pay, and the only possible connection to anyone in his universe was those kids on the front porch who must have smoked a joint with Jamie.

And so he stormed off to give Jamie a piece of his mind. Jamie, meanwhile, didn't know what the fuck was happening with Arnold, whom he considered a benign sociopath who lived on another floor and needed to be spoken to softly. He didn't like Arnold's tone of voice and was particularly upset about being blamed for something he knew fuck all about. If one of the kids who actually set the fire hadn't come by to separate Arnold from Jamie, someone would have gotten punched, so it's a good thing he was there, though he actually didn't know either of them and was just there to see Angie, who also bore no responsibility for the torching of Arnold's shrine to Shiva.

Arnold never got revenge but Shiva gave Jamie a bad case of the crabs when he mistook her for a cheap hooker.

Moral: You never know when you're going to piss off one of the Gods so you may as well do whatever feels good.

Tales from the House of Glitch #1: The Ghost of Angie

The Ghost of Angie

 

Rodney loved Edna, his old girlfriend in Philly, loved her so much he knew he needed to do something special to keep him in her mind, after all, Seattle was a long way away, and Edna couldn't be certain if Rodney was really coming back, not knowing if she should save herself in any way whatsoever for his potential return. He was in Seattle for a gig lasting a month and found a boarding house much cheaper than a motel. The House of Glitch was just the right distance from the U where he dug the Chinese food.

 

He decided the something special for Edna should be postcards, incredible postcards, from all over town, historical sepias of the canal before the locks and magnificent full color sunsets of Mount Rainier with the grasshopper loading cranes in the Puget Sound behind the Bainbridge Island Ferry.  But that wasn't enough. Using the most of his massive cartooning ability, he blocked out a story in perhaps twenty frames, where the first postcard would seem to have a mistake in it, a mistake that wouldn't make any sense until the arrival of the second postcard days later, something incredibly clever, reminding her what a treasure he was, a unique talent she would want forever in her life.

 

He finished the first five postcards, each more elaborate than the last, each one guaranteed to successively boggle her mind to the utmost, until the arrival of the next which would outdo them all. He put on the stamps and left the postcards on the kitchen table to run to his room, grab his backpack, turn out the lights, and lock the door. When he got back to the kitchen, the postcards were gone and Angie, one of the other residents in the House of Glitch, was frying an egg.

 

"Where are my postcards?" asked Rodney.

 

"I gave them to the postman," said Angie.

 

Rodney ran outside and tried to catch the postman but it was too late, he was already driving down the street.

 

The whole thing was ruined. The postcards would make absolutely no sense when they were received all at once. They had to be received one at a time and in the proper order. Now he wouldn't look like a genius to Edna. He'd look like an idiot.

 

Rodney came back into the kitchen. Angie was eating her eggs. "You don't have to thank me," she said. Rodney picked up the frying pan and beat her over the head with it several times.

 

Edna got the postcards and thought Rodney was a genius anyway. She wrote him back but he never got her postcards because he was in jail, where he remains to this day, for the murder of Angie who just thought she was doing him a favor, and whose ghostly presence haunts the House of Glitch to this day whenever someone makes breakfast.

 

MORAL: Never do anyone a favor.