Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death

By Richard Zoglin

Everything else from the '60s has come back; why not the Firesign Theatre, which took recorded comedy as close to the edge of sanity as it could go, in albums like I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus? The group--Peter Bergman, Phil Proctor, David Ossman and Phil Austin--is back with a new CD, and it's both a nostalgia trip and a bracing return to the edge: a dense, doomy, free-association riff on the last broadcast day of the millennium, featuring commercials, traffic reports, Joe Camel's last press conference, the Ebola Virus Ball and a conglomerate called U.S. Plus ("We own the idea of the idea of America"). Listen three times for best results, and look out for the guys with the eyeball hats.

--By Richard Zoglin