ITHACA, New York, Oct. 8 -- Cornell University issued the following news: Somewhere between the virtuosic parodies of Frank Zappa and the screwball wit of Monty Python, the Firesign Theatre reinvented the comedy album in the 1960s and '70s. With a pioneering use of multitrack audio and avant-garde collage, the group's nine deliriously dense LPs released by Columbia Records were a countercultural salvo against the burgeoning information age. In his new book, "Firesign: The Electromagnetic Hist  more