It is hard to think of a performer whose music changed as radically from one medium to another as did that of the great Spike Jones. Call him the Marshall McLuhan of American popular culture. During his glory years in the 1940s, Jones was constantly on the road with his Musical Depreciation Revue, training from town to town with his merry band of musical comics and sound-effects specialists.

Nearly all the writing about Jones recounts his extravagant, almost indescribable stage shows. Even though he had several million-selling records and at least one No. 1 hit, very little attention was paid to his records when they were new on the shelves. Since his death in 1965 at age 53, his live shows have largely been forgotten, though his recordings have inspired several generations of comic musicians, from Esquivel to P.D.Q. Bach, Frank Zappa, and “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Jones, who is the subject of a new DVD collection from Infinity Entertainment, “Spike Jones: The Legend,” brought two major innovations to American pop. The first was the idea that sound effects used on radio and film soundtracks, when used in tempo and rhythm, could become an essential part of the music; instead of building to a rim shot or a clarinet break, Jones would punctuate a melody with a gunshot, a cowbell, a car backfiring, or a woman screaming. Ornette Coleman once expressed admiration for this element of Jones’s performance — the idea of dissolving the barrier between noise and music — and one can imagine John Cage or the avant-gardists of any other musical epoch feeling the same way.

Before Jones, nearly every bandleader played novelty songs, but they were considered the low-slung end of the music business: Jones discovered that it was possible to extract great comedy from great music, from Tchaikovsky (as in “The Nutcracker”) to Johnny Mercer (“That Old Black Magic” and “Laura”). Jones also played silly songs, but he was funniest when he took a piece of real music and relentlessly gagged it up — not just with garbage cans, barking dogs, bird calls, and falling anvils, but with a band that sounded like Salvador Dalí’s idea of Dixieland. Owing to the extremely visual nature of Jones’s touring act, one might think that the band would have been a major hit on television. He eventually had a show that ran for 20 episodes in 1957, but Jones’s TV shows somehow lacked the panache and punch of his classic recordings. Blame it on McLuhan: Jones was brilliant in the hot, audio-only media, but not nearly as effective in the cool medium of the small screen. Part of it is just the economics of the era, in that TV producers and sponsors reduced Jones’s inspired lunacy to mere grist for the variety-show mill, with guest stars and sketches that were almost never as funny as we’d have liked them to be.

Yet this new release provides the missing link in Jones’s evolution. The gem of the four-disc package, which collects four hours of his 1951 and 1952 television specials, is his first major TV appearance, telecast live on February 11, 1951, as part of the “Colgate Comedy Hour” series. This hour-long show is easily the most entertaining piece of visual footage that Jones and his band, the City Slickers, left us. As time passed and he did more television, the more like everyone else Jones became, but this first show is more or less a camera pointed in the direction of Jones’s legendary touring stage show.

All the bits that you’ve heard about are here: the bass saxophonist who sends a frog flying out of the bell of his instrument; trombonists whose trousers fall and rise according to the pitch of the note they play; two headless dudes enjoying a pantomime conversation; the bass fiddle that gives birth to a midget; two chickens serenading each other to the tune of “Holiday for Strings,” as if to illustrate that hope is the thing with feathers or that they know why the guy in the bird suit sings; the harpist on the sidelines of the action who spends most of the show knitting and puffing on a nasty-looking stogie during her own solo. You can’t trust any instrument: Everything from the piano to the violin is liable to explode at any moment.

Then there’s the ringleader himself, who, when he isn’t conducting a classical piece with a toilet plunger for a baton, chasing a chorus girl with a giant sword, or parading in mermaid drag, is a remarkably understated presence, looking on from the side with a David Letterman-like smirk.

Ironically, Jones began to run out of steam in the mid-1950s, just as television and rock ‘n’ roll were getting to know each other. He said that it was impossible to parody the new pop music since it was so ludicrous to begin with, which proved untrue — there would be plenty of City Slicker-inspired satirists in the rock era. But he was correct in that there had been a sea change in the culture, which, retroactively, makes Jones’s TV shows harder to appreciate. Viewed by 21st-century sensibilities, the “straight” portions of his shows look no less surreal. There’s the appearance of a busty female acrobat, built rather like Jayne Mansfield, wearing a low-cut French maid outfit and enormous high heels, bouncing up and down on a trampoline; somehow it seems more contemporary than anything else on the discs, like something Howard Stern would stage.

The first show, which begins with the Slickers’ rendition of the Middle-Eastern-flavored favorites “In a Persian Market” and “The Sheik of Araby,” also includes a rare TV appearance by the spastic spoonerist Doodles Weaver, as well as a full-dress treatment of “Glow Worm,” delivered by a stout soprano whose giggling and jiggling midriff are the funniest parts of the piece. The later shows include some wonderful guest stars, such as the great Billy Eckstine (whose numbers are unforgivably deleted) and the Liberace Brothers, as well as Jones’s talented chanteuse wife, Helen Grayco (who sings an Argentine tango in Gypsy get-up). But as early as the second show, a lot of time is wasted on a long Foreign Legion sketch, which is redeemed only by a villain named “El Schlemiel.”

This is as close as anyone ever came to staging a Tex Avery cartoon, not just in live action, but live in person, before our very eyes. As Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Betty Comden and Adolph Green (not to mention Mel Brooks), and others have proved in other contexts, great comedy and great music are flipsides of the same coin. As Jones says in a rare on-camera interview on the third disc, “If it wasn’t for good music, what would I have to wreck?”

wfriedwald@nysun.com