Comedy album

For example, various collections of humorous short stories recited by vaudeville comedian Cal Stewart were released by Edison Records as early as 1898.

[6][2] The 1960s saw a comedy album phenomenon with the likes of Nichols and May, Smothers Brothers, Jonathan Winters, Dick Gregory, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Tom Lehrer, Bill Cosby, Lenny Bruce, Redd Foxx, Allan Sherman and Vaughn Meader.

Notable artists were among others George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, Richard Pryor, Robert Klein, David Steinberg, Lily Tomlin, National Lampoon and Steve Martin.

Side 1 consists of a trilogy of extended audio plays: "Temporarily Humboldt County" (9:14), which satirizes the Europeans' displacement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas; "W.C. Fields Forever" (7:39), which satirizes the 1960s hippie culture, and "Le Trente-Huit Cunegonde (Returned For Regrooving)" (7:19) which imagined a projected future in which the roles of the hippie counterculture and the Establishment culture have reversed roles.

Side 2 (17:48) is the title track, a stream-of-consciousness play about an American tourist to an Eastern Bloc country, who ends up in prison and is rescued by the CIA.

The Firesign Theatre produced fifteen albums designed for FM air play under two five-year recording contracts, and spawned an underground comedy cult.

[citation needed] Party records were a genre of blue comedy albums in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s that were notable for their raunchy adult content and often featured African American comedians.