- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers is the finest album by the Firesign Theatre – Rolling Stone calls it the greatest comedy album of all time.
The Firesign Theatre – Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (1970): This mind-bending comedy troupe acquired their name when the four men realized that their zodiac signs were all fire signs. I had to look it up, but it seems that each zodiac sign is associated with one of the ancient elements of earth, air, fire, and water. The three fire signs are Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius. Starting out on radio and occasionally returning to that medium, the Firesign Theatre are best known for their surreal albums that have a psychedelic or hallucinatory aspect to them. Their album names and covers are about as wacky as it gets, with their previous album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969) featuring the bandmembers standing within a lineup that appears to be military or Communist dictators, beneath a poster proclaiming “All Hail Marx and Lennon” with photos of Groucho Marx and John Lennon.
Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers is their most accomplished album – The New Rolling Stone Record Guide calls it the greatest comedy album of all time and notes that Firesign Theatre albums are designed specifically for that format and stand up to dozens or even hundreds of plays. Essentially, an apparently retired actor named George Leroy Tirebiter is watching himself on television and changing channels frequently, with the heart of the album being a movie called High School Madness; there are additional excerpts from a Korean War movie called Parallel Hell. The movies are being shown on a television program called The Howl of the Wolf Movie whose slogan is: “Presenting honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars”. Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers was added to the National Recording Registry in 2005, with the Library of Congress calling the Firesign Theatre “the Beatles of comedy”.