Firesign Rekindles Its Flame : After a Hiatus From Progressive Humor, the Funny Foursome Returns

Don’t be alarmed if that portfolio manager or graying professorial type sitting next to you at the Wiltern Theatre Sunday night bellows out lines like “Betty Jo Bialowski? I haven’t heard that name since college,” or fumbles in an attache case for a bulbous red nose to greet the clowns appearing in “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.” You’re not witnessing an outburst of pre-senescent dementia. It’s the standard, immensely grateful, long-lost response to the Firesign Theater, the four-man team that is back on track after 13 years in the doldrums.

“We’re back because Bill Clinton is in the White House,” says Peter Bergman. “You may not like his politics or his solutions, but as President he’s openly engaged with his American audience. The long period of American denial is over.”

So is the long period of Firesign burnout. It’s been 26 years since Bergman, Phil Proctor, David Ossman and Phil Austin first got together on Bergman’s late-night free-for-all KPFK radio program, “Radio Free Oz,” which led a year later to their first album on Columbia, “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him.”

There was no one like them , in this and other albums, including “How Can You Be in Two Places When You’re Not Anywhere at All” (which introduced “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger”), “Dear Friends,” “Everything You Know Is Wrong” and the extraordinary “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers”--albums that blended deft, surreal, Pynchonesque humor with state-of-the art recording technology, and which fed the minds of a generation whose cultural roots had not yet been amputated by television. Hence your fiftysomethings babbling like parched wanderers fallen onto a desert spring.

“Who are our influences?” Bergman mused aloud in his publicist’s Los Angeles office on a recent afternoon. “Jean Genet. Ionesco. Bob & Ray. Stan Freberg. Spike Milligan of ‘The Goon Show.’ ”

“Ernie Kovacs,” added Proctor. “Kafka. Sid Caesar. If I may speak metaphorically . . . “

“Please do,” Bergman said.

“Marshall McLuhan had all these clarifying insights about media, but was considered only a serious man. He liked our comedy, which complements his ideas.”

“The Marx Brothers,” Bergman added. “Very few people have seen us live. They wonder if they’re going to get an illustrated lecture. But it’s pure theater.”

Suddenly, the office’s telephone made the high-pitched electronic burble characteristic of post-modern phones, which no longer ring. Bergman and Proctor scurried to two phone banks. Bergman chose the wrong one. Proctor couldn’t activate the other.

“Ah, technology,” Proctor muttered.

Finally a voice issued from the electronic beyond, so swaddled in static hiss that you half expected to hear “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” It was Phil Austin, traveling with his wife and four dogs, and calling from his van phone somewhere near Peoria. (He hadn’t caught up with the others in Los Angeles because he doesn’t fly.)

*

Aside from the long inward-turning public withdrawal from assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, hostage and oil crises and a spent counterculture, what finally shut down the Firesign Theater in 1981 was its own exhausted energies. You can’t put out antenna as fine as theirs into the hurly-burly without becoming at least a little fried. And though their tensions were creative (they each work from individual notepads on which they jot what Proctor calls “found reality”), they were still tensions.

“There were frictions,” Bergman conceded. “There’s no leader in this group. It’s always been anarchy in the real sense.”

But Austin was calling in with a reassuring note. “The important thing is that we’re all getting along, including our families,” he said through the static.

“We’ve always been monitoring the country in some way, and I think we’re in a very good period now. It’s a very healing thing to see how well a Hillary Clinton can deal with Regis and Kathie Lee. We’re trying to mold a new language between print and the language of TV. There’s a tremendous disparity between people in their 20s and people in their 60s. It’s up to us who’ve been through the baby boom generation to pass on what we know to the X Generation, or whatever you want to call it, and to try and acknowledge and understand its art and expression.

“A lot of good things are ridiculed at first,” he said by way of trying to bridge the generational divide.

HBO plans to tape a future special of the Firesign four in action; the group is planning a new album called “The Illusion of Unity.” In the meantime, nostalgia buffs and curious X’ers alike should be impressed Sunday--in the last leg of the troupe’s national tour--by how prescient so much of the Firesign material has turned out to be. “Beat the Reaper” has its contemporary expression in the lottery nature of our health-care system. In “Temporarily Humbolt County,” Native American culture would, in lesser hands, have been dispersed in apocalyptic desert winds. Here the culture is mopped up by the movies, after the wind is done with it. To the ‘90s, relevance means getting your own development deal.

The segment first aired in 1967. When you’re ahead of your time, you often have to stop and wait.