The Firesign Theatre, "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers" (Columbia, 1970)

OK, this particular recording doesn't exactly fall into the "music" category. But it's something you can give a spin, so what the heck.

Just as popular music started really pushing the boundaries in the late '60s, so did the world of comedy. Lenny Bruce got the ball rolling a decade before, but unfortunately he didn't live to see how the medium progressed.

One of the more interesting comedy acts to emerge from the era was the four-member Firesign Theatre, an ensemble that decided to focus its efforts on producing comedy records. That hardly was a new concept; for example, Vaughn Meader scored huge hits with "First Family" parodies of President Kennedy's family (that is, until events in Dallas pretty much ended Meader's career). But the Firesign guys - Philip Proctor, David Ossman, Philip Austin and Peter Bergman - took their craft to a whole new level, employing state-of-the-art recording techniques to develop soundscapes that played as much of a role in the listening experience as the material itself.

"Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers" represents the ensemble's third such effort, following the similarly verbosely titled "Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him" and "How Can You Be in Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere at All?" This time around, the Firesigners decided to sustain a common theme over two album sides, and it works to perfection.

The main theme revolves around a "This Is Your Life"-type examination of one George Leroy Tirebiter, who at various times is a college student, a character in a movie called "High School Madness" and an old man looking back on his career in Vaudeville. If that doesn't quite make sense, it really doesn't have to: The Firesigners create their own alternative reality, and the listener just has to be willing to go along for the ride.

While students of the album - and they exist - go to lengths to find coherent meaning in the work as a whole, "Don't Crush the Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers" also works as a rapid-fire series of jokes, mostly set in motion by the apparent clicking of a TV dial that takes the listener through a series of warped versions of televangelist shows, news broadcasts, political spots, commercials, game shows, mock trials and old-time movies.

Plenty of the humor is overt, but often you have to listen closely to pick up on everything. And that's the beauty of this album, and of most of Firesign's catalog: It stands up to repeated playings (unlike, say, a Jeff Foxworthy standup routine, which might not seem all that funny the first time around).

This is a music-oriented column, so I'll note that "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers" does contain some snippets of some tunes. And of course, they're funny.