Your First Three Words in Turkish

Towel...

In a recent comment, I mentioned the Firesign Theatre (or, possibly, Theater).  To American readers of a certain age and inclination, the Firesign Theatre will be as familar as Monty Python.  However, very few Brits seem to know their work, even those cosmopolitan types who were familiar with, say, the Cheech and Chong recorded oeuvre.  British politicos in the 1970s tended towards the puritanical, and British stoners tended towards the horizontal.  Humour was rarely a common ground between the two camps, and a taste for left-field, post-modern, acid-tinged, surrealist political sketch comedy and soap opera was more unusual than you might think.

But some tastes are like a secret cult, whose members are always looking for new recruits.  One day in my first term at college in 1973, a new friend (now, confusingly, Professor of Islamic Archaeology in the University of Oxford)  pressed into my hands two objects, saying, in effect, "Here, I think you need to know about these".  One was a book -- Musrum, by Eric Thacker and Anthony Earnshaw (in need of a post in its own right) -- and the other was an LP album by Firesign Theatre.  I can't remember now whether it was How Can You Be In Two Places At Once, When You're Not Anywhere At All? or Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him.  One or the other.  Probably the latter.  As if it matters.

Bath...

As well as being funny, Firesign's albums were pretty sophisticated for their time.  Nowadays, po-mo reflexiveness is the default setting of every jobbing standup -- it's the comedy equivalent of conceptual art -- but even today it is rare to find such acute explorations and subversions of media tropes, linguistic cliches, and political and social conventions.  If I had to characterise FT for someone who'd never heard them, I'd say it was like Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In crossed with The Goon Show, tinged with Frank Zappa and That Was The Week That Was.  Not that that would help: they would probably never had heard (or even heard of) any of those acts, either.

"Hearing" is key, though: it's very much an aural experience, with quick-change accents, scene changes and sound-effects that evoke and parody the glory days of radio.  And, as is well known, the pictures are always better on radio.  It's also very layered: some of the best jokes happen in the background, mixed behind the dialogue.  There's nothing around now that is remotely similar, as far as I know: that late sixties / early seventies mashup of politics, counterculture, and nostalgia-fuelled zaniness was a flavour all its own.  No, wait... Didn't I say that on the other side of the record?

Border...
(May I see your passport, sir?)