Consumer Guide Album

Firesign Theatre: Not Insane [Columbia, 1972]
At their best, these four men represent the pinnacle of recorded comedy--multi-leveled both aurally and intellectually, almost silly-funny and very serious at the same time. Their second and third albums (How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All? and Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers) present their basic thesis--that the US lost World War II. Their fourth, a two-LP set of radio tapes entitled Dear Friends, is more conventionally ha-ha, albeit devastating. But on I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus, they abandon humor for sci-fi middle seriousness, and this one, recorded mostly at one of their rare live performances, is mostly sight gags. Nos. 2 and 3 are A+, No. 4 an A, No. 5 a B-. This one, C-