Bergman studied playwriting and collaborated as lyricist with Austin Pendleton in 1958 on two Yale Dramat musicals in which Proctor starred: Tom Jones, and Booth Is Back In Town.

[4][5] In 1965, Bergman spent a year working in England on the BBC television program Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life and went to see surrealist comedian Spike Milligan in a play.

[7] On returning to the US, Bergman started a late-night listener-participation talk show, Radio Free Oz, on July 24, 1966, on listener-sponsored KPFK FM in Los Angeles, working with producers Phil Austin and David Ossman.

In 1969, they created improvised television commercials for Jack Poet Volkswagen in Highland Park, California, with the characters of Christian Cyborg (Bergman), Coco Lewis (Proctor), Bob Chicken (Austin), and Tony Gomez (Ossman).

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

It was recorded in CBS's Los Angeles radio studio from which The Jack Benny Program and others had been broadcast; the original RCA microphones and sound effects devices were used.

[7] How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All, released in 1969, consists of a stream-of-consciousness play on side one about a man named Babe (Bergman) who buys a car and goes on a road trip that turns into a parody of Norman Corwin's 1941 patriotic radio pageant We Hold These Truths.

This album was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1971 by the World Science Fiction Society,[19] Dwarf brought a level of success to the Firesigns that started to spoil them.

[23] The record predicts the rise of pay cable TV, and it depicts an amateur station run by two men who must constantly block a group of teenage hijackers.

[21] He co-directed the album with Columbia producer Stephen Gillmor, and the other three Firesigns starred on it, along with several guest personalities including Wolfman Jack, Harry Shearer of The Credibility Gap, and broadcast journalist Lew Irwin.

Mark returns on New Year's Eve, 1999, from a twenty-year round trip to Planet X, only to find the space program has been dismantled, and no one cares about him except for an eccentric impresario (Bergman) who kidnaps him for his video recordings of encounters with alien life.

The group reunited in late August 1973 to produce the Sherlock Holmes parody The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra,[21] based on one of the plays from their 1967 Magic Mushroom broadcasts, By the Light of the Silvery.

"[7] As Austin looked back on this period from September 1993, he wrote that he saw Proctor and Bergman wanting to take the Firesign Theatre in a different direction than he did, moving away from intensely written albums released one per year, to more live performances with lighter material.

[24] They produced a live stage show Radio Laffs of 1940, which included a second episode of the private eye character Nick Danger, "School For Actors"; and a soap opera "Over the Edge".

Proctor and Bergman gave up their road performances after witnessing the September 4, 1977 Golden Dragon Massacre, and in 1978 released another studio album Give Us a Break, which lampooned radio and television.

[25] In December 1978, they began writing five short (2:24) episodes of Nick Danger: The Case of the Missing Shoe for a possible syndicated daily radio series.

[25] Meanwhile, Proctor and Bergman produced a film, J-Men Forever, using clips from old Republic Pictures movie serials with dubbed dialogue, combined with new footage of them as FBI agents tracking down a villain known as "the Lightning Bug" voiced by disk jockey M. G. Kelly.

The tour, consisting of live performances of material adapted from their first four Golden Age albums (Electrician, Two Places At Once, Dwarf, and Bozos), was recorded on CD and a DVD video released in 1994.

"[29] The Firesigns followed this with the 1998 album Pink Hotel Burns Down, a collection of material from two 1967 Magic Mushroom broadcasts, Exorcism In Your Daily Life and their early Sherlock Holmes parody "By the Light of the Silvery"; two cuts, "The Pink Hotel" and "The Sand Bar" from their video game record that eventually became Eat or Be Eaten; the soap opera "Over the Edge" from Austin and Ossman's 1976 Dr. Firesign's Theatre of Mystery tour, and several clips from their radio work, including the earliest recorded appearance on Radio Free Oz.

This contained live, updated performance material based on Waiting for the Electrician, How Can You Be in Two Places..., and Don't Crush That Dwarf; and included interviews and two Jack Poet Volkswagen commercials.

From November 2002 through early 2003, Bergman produced a political satire series True Confessions of the Real World, three times weekly on Pasadena non-commercial KPCC FM.

Philip Proctor (born under the fire sign Leo in Goshen, Indiana[7] on July 28, 1940) was a boy soprano in a children's choir and studied acting at Yale.

David Ossman (born under the fire sign Sagittarius in Santa Monica, California[7] on December 6, 1936), the oldest Firesign, is known as the intellectual of the group, and he is known for doing an old-man voice (most famously as Catherwood the butler in the original Nick Danger story, George Tirebiter on Don't Crush That Dwarf and In the Next World You're On Your Own, and as the elder ant Cornelius in Disney Pixar's 1998 A Bug's Life.)

Outside of the Firesign Theatre, he has performed several voices on The Tick animated TV series and worked extensively as a producer and on-air narrator on National Public Radio and several affiliated stations.

She is credited as a member of "the St. Louis Aquarium Choraleers" (singing the hymn "Marching to Shibboleth") and as "the Wake-Up Lady" and for birdsong on Don't Crush That Dwarf; as "Mickey" and with keyboard stylings on I Think We're All Bozos; with film footage on the Dear Friends album; and organ, piano, and vocals on Not Insane.

[43] She is credited as an anonymous extra in I Think We're All Bozos; was photographed as one of the Roller Maidens From Outer Space and sang backup vocals for the Austin solo album;[44] and appeared as a Reebus Caneebus groupie in the film version of Everything You Know Is Wrong.

[45] She is the model for the blonde femme fatale on the cover art of the Box of Danger CD set,[45] and is credited with performing support functions such as photography and catering on several of the later albums.

"[51] Comedians George Carlin, Robin Williams, and John Goodman enjoyed the Firesigns' comedy and lent their comments to the 2001 PBS television special Weirdly Cool.

[21][52] Musical satirist "Weird Al" Yankovic paid homage to the Firesigns by giving the title "Everything You Know Is Wrong" to an original song on his 1996 album Bad Hair Day.

[55][56] In Madison, Wisconsin in 1974, a pair of University of Illinois students opened the first of a regional chain of pizza restaurants they named "Rocky Rococo"[57] after the Nick Danger character, without any mention of connection to the Firesign Theatre.