Sellers plays all of the roles, satirising the British class system and rock and roll, and the album represented an artistic breakthrough for producer George Martin.

[4] Sellers first appeared on record in 1953 when he lent his voice to Parlophone's Jakka and the Flying Saucers, a science fiction play for children written by lyricist Ken Hare and composer Ron Goodwin.

[3][7] Sellers was signed to Parlophone as a solo act in 1957, reuniting him with Martin after the success of the producer's first comedy LP, a live recording of Flanders and Swann's musical revue At the Drop of a Hat.

For Sellers' first single, the two created a version of the music hall number "Any Old Iron" employing a skiffle arrangement and the voice of The Goon Show character Willium "Mate" Cobblers.

[3][8] Recognising Sellers' capacity for "a daydreaming form of humour which could be amusing and seductive without requiring the trigger of a live audience", Martin pitched a full album to EMI.

[3] Musical direction was provided by Ron Goodwin who, with George Martin, "placed Sellers' inventions in a soundscape which meant that you kept playing the record long after any belly laughs had exhausted themselves" according to David Hepworth.

[9] The album was a breakthrough for Martin, who had been inspired by Stan Freberg's work for Capitol; according to Mark Lewisohn, The Best of Sellers was the first British comedy LP created in a recording studio.

[2] "The Trumpet Volunteer" consists of an interview between a reporter and a young Cockney pop star named Mr. Iron, a parody of Bermondsey-born teen idol Tommy Steele.

[10] Iron is depicted as ill-informed and naive and discusses his new rock and roll version of Jeremiah Clarke's Trumpet voluntary, dismissing its disputed authorship (Purcell) as irrelevant – "All I know is, it's out of copyright".

[3] Described by Mark Lewisohn as the best example of Sellers' satires of the music business, "I'm So Ashamed" "cruelly but hilariously takes apart the present-day "child prodigy" craze" according to Ken Graham of Disc.

[2] Writing in the Leicester Mercury, John Mitchell praised Sellers' "startlingly wide talents" and considered his impersonations "uncannily close to life", comparing them favourably against "the old, 'voice of 'em all' school, doing impressions of Charles Laughton and Gracie Fields".

[28] In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Richie Unterberger deemed Sellers' first album "probably his funniest" and praised "The Trumpet Volunteer" and "We Need the Money" as "two of the best rock & roll parodies ever made".

[11] Writing in The Beatles: All These Years: Volume One – Tune In, Mark Lewisohn praised the album as "a five-star record", considering it "an early and robust example" of the productions George Martin referred to as 'sound pictures'.

Upon hearing of this, the writers Frank Muir and Denis Norden penned a letter published in the Evening Standard stating "for a trifling sum, we would be prepared to go along to the new shopping centre and stand there personally".

[33] In 2011, broadcaster and writer Danny Baker chose "I'm So Ashamed" as one of his Desert Island Discs on the BBC radio programme, describing its lyric as "an eternal truth in pop music".