Nick Danger
Detective character in Firesign Theatre plays
Nick Danger is a fictional character created by the comedy group The Firesign Theatre, portrayed by Phil Austin. Danger is a parody of the hard-boiled detective, and is often announced as "Nick Danger, Third Eye", a parody of the term private eye. Danger stories involve stereotypical film noir situations, including mistaken identity, betrayal, and femmes fatales. Danger originally appears on the 1969 album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All, and is reprised in the 1979 Nick Danger: The Case of the Missing Shoe, 1984 The Three Faces of Al, and 2001 The Bride of Firesign.
He's based on the [Dashiell] Hammett Sam Spade character, but as I got more into writing him over the years, he's become much more like [Philip] Marlowe. I love [Raymond] Chandler's writing.
Development
In January 1969, while the Firesign Theatre's radio show Radio Free Oz was running on KMET (FM), the Firesigns wrote a pilot script for a show inspired by Fred Allen's 1942 show Allen's Alley, to be broadcast live from the Los Angeles Elks Hall near MacArthur Park. The script contained a third act based on a hardboiled detective Nick Danger, modeled after Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. When KMET rejected the pilot, the Firesigns expanded the script to a 28-minute mock radio play, which they recorded in January and February. This was released in July as the second side of their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All.
“Nick Danger” enters the record as detective character in Firesign Theatre plays. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nick, Danger and Detective can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q48733061. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1979, 1984 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nick Danger” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.