Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- The Accordion under Construction: The Origins of Spike Milligan’s Comedic Style, and of The Goon Show -- The Accordion Beating Time: Temporal Distortions in The Goon Show -- The Accordion Stretching in All Directions: Spatial Distortions in The Goon Show -- Children Teach Lessons on the Accordion: Preoperational Cognitive Strategies in The Goon Show -- The Accordion Plays a New Tune before Anyone Can Write It Down: Anticipations of Postmodernism in The Goon Show -- Conclusion: The Accordion is Packed Away -- Sources -- Index.

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“It’s all rather confusing, really” was one of the catchphrases used by Spike Milligan in his ground-breaking radio comedy program The Goon Show. In a series of mock-epics broadcast over the course of a decade, Milligan treated listeners to a cosmology governed by confusion, contradictions, fluidity and uncertainty. In The Goon Show ’s universe, time and space expand and contract seemingly at will and without notice. The worldview featured in The Goon Show looked both backward and forward: backward, in the sense that it paralleled strategies used by schoolchildren to understand time and space; forward, in the ways it anticipated and prefigured a number of key features of postmodern thought. Winner of the Ann Saddlemyer Award 2017 of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research.