Stan Freberg, a humorist whose sprawling imagination fueled a multifaceted career that included pretty much inventing the idea of using satire in commercials, died on Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 88.

His death was announced by his son, Donavan.

Mr. Freberg was a hard man to pin down. He made hit comedy records, voiced hundreds of cartoon characters and succeeded Jack Benny in one of radio’s most prestigious time slots. He called himself a “guerrilla satirist,” using humor as a barbed weapon to take on issues ranging from the commercialization of Christmas to the hypocrisy of liberals.

“Let’s give in and do the brotherhood bit,/Just make sure we don’t make a habit of it,” he sang in “Take an Indian to Lunch,” a song on the 1961 album “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America,” a history lesson in songs and sketches. Time magazine said it may have been the “finest comedy album ever recorded.”

His radio sketches for CBS in 1957 included some of the earliest put-downs of political correctness (before that idea had a name). One sketch entailed a confrontation with a fictional network censor, Mr. Tweedlie, who insisted that Mr. Freberg change the lyrics of “Ol’ Man River,” starting with the title. He wanted it renamed “Elderly Man River.”

Mr. Freberg made his most lasting impact in advertising, a field he entered because he considered most commercials moronic. Usually working as a creative consultant to large agencies, he shattered Madison Avenue conventions. He once produced a musical commercial nearly six minutes long to explain why his client, Butternut Coffee, lagged behind its competitors by five years in developing instant brew.

His subversive but oddly effective approach caused Advertising Age to call him the father of the funny commercial and one of the 20th century’s most influential admen. He won the Clio, a top industry award, 21 times, and had a diverse clientele, including General Motors, the United States Army and the Presbyterian Church.

Mr. Freberg’s tactics worked for the simple reason that he was funny, having honed his humor on some of history’s best-selling comedy records. Paul McCartney said in 1985 that the Beatles’ anarchic humor owed much to his influence.

Stephen King and David Mamet separately remembered how, when they were young, the fantastic vision Mr. Freberg concocted in a radio commercial helped unleash their imaginations. In Mr. Freberg’s telling, Lake Michigan is drained and filled with hot chocolate, after which a plane drops a 700-foot mountain of whipped cream and a 10-ton maraschino cherry. Some 25,000 imaginary extras cheer.

Mr. Freberg used humor to declare war on postwar advertising, which in the 1950s was criticized by the likes of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the social critic Vance Packard as selling people stuff they didn’t need. Fellow admen saw Mr. Freberg’s renegade approach as the insult it was. Although he is in the Radio Hall of Fame, he was never elected to the Advertising Hall of Fame.

But his wackiness fit sensibilities increasingly attuned to the satirical comedy of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. Mr. Freberg even committed, eagerly, the ad industry’s greatest heresy: lampooning the deficiencies of a paying client’s own products.

His Pacific Airlines advertisements took on fear of flying by telling people that even the pilots were afraid. As part of the campaign, flight attendants passed out “survival kits” that included security blankets, a lucky rabbit’s foot and fortune cookies bearing the slogan “It could be worse.”

Upon landing, the attendants were encouraged to exclaim: “We made it! How about that!”

How do you sell Sunsweet prunes? Mr. Freberg figured at least one selling point was that their pits had been removed. His ad proclaimed that another improvement was on the way: “Today the pits; tomorrow the wrinkles!”

To pitch Chun King Chow Mein, he had an announcer saying, “Nine out of 10 doctors prefer Chun King.” The camera panned to show them — nine of them Asian, the other Caucasian.

Mr. Freberg’s confidence in his salesmanship showed in his preference for contracts that gave him a percentage of sales if the commercials worked. It also showed in a clause in all his contracts: “The decision as to what’s funny and what is not funny shall rest solely with Mr. Freberg.”

Stanley Victor Freberg was born on Aug. 7, 1926, in Los Angeles and grew up in nearby South Pasadena. His father was a Baptist minister who moonlighted as a vacuum-cleaner salesman.

The young Mr. Freberg earned scholarships to Stanford and the University of Redlands by winning speaking contests but turned the offers down, deciding to chase his dream of working in radio. After stepping off a bus in the center of Hollywood, he knocked on the door of a talent agency and was soon auditioning for the Warner Bros. cartoon department, which hired him.

He went on to be the voice of many characters. For Warner Bros. he was, among others, Tosh, one of the Goofy Gophers. For Disney he was a beaver in “Lady and the Tramp” (1955). In 2011 he reprised his Warner Bros. character Pete Puma on “The Looney Tunes Show” on Cartoon Network. He continued doing voice work until last year.

After two years in the Army, Mr. Freberg worked without pay for a radio show on which he was interviewed as numerous different men-on-the-street. He got a paying job as a guitar player with a dance band, then quickly learned to play the instrument. His jokes more than compensated for his musical ineptitude.

Bob Clampett, part of the Looney Tunes crew, recruited him for the TV puppet show “Time for Beany” which ran from 1949 to 1954. Mr. Freberg was the voice of a 300-year-old sea serpent named Cecil. The show numbered Albert Einstein among its fans.

Mr. Freberg began making comedy records during this period, among them spoofs of popular singers like Elvis Presley and Harry Belafonte and television shows like Lawrence Welk’s, presaging the sort of humor seen on “Saturday Night Live” a quarter-century later. His 1953 hit “St. George and the Dragonet” was a parody of the popular police series “Dragnet” set in the Middle Ages, with the detective hero — Mr. Freberg imitating Jack Webb — rescuing a maiden from a dragon.

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One of his most popular records was a 1951 soap-opera parody in which characters named John and Marsha say only each other’s names — sometimes shouting, sometimes pouting, always fervently emoting. The AMC series “Mad Men” paid homage to “John and Marsha” in the first show of its fourth season in 2010 when Peggy Olson, a copywriter at the fictional ad agency Sterling Cooper, turns to a young part-timer working for her and purrs, “Johhhn!” He replies, “Marr-sha!”

In 1957, Mr. Freberg was selected to fill Jack Benny’s time slot on CBS Radio. He ran into trouble with jokes about the hydrogen bomb and angered executives by refusing tobacco advertisements. CBS pulled the show after 15 weeks.

Mr. Freberg’s first wife, the former Donna Andresen, died in 2000. In addition to his son, Donavan, he is survived by his wife, Hunter Freberg; his daughter, Donna Jean Freberg; and one granddaughter.

Mr. Freberg continued to work in advertising, and in show business. For many years he collaborated on and off with the producer David Merrick on a Broadway show based on “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America,” but he pulled out when Mr. Merrick eliminated Lincoln from the Civil War sequence because, according to Mr. Merrick, Lincoln “didn’t work” — or so Mr. Freberg said.

The aborted Broadway show included material from both Mr. Freberg’s original American history album, which ended with the victory in the Revolutionary War, and a second volume, released in 1996. The follow-up album included a scene in which Lincoln listens to General Ulysses S. Grant’s plans for the Battle of Shiloh.

“Say,” Lincoln says, “you’re quite the Civil War buff.”

Correction: April 10, 2015 

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Wednesday about the satirist Stan Freberg misstated the year he last did voice work for cartoons. It was 2014, not 2011.

CREDIT: DOUGLAS MARTIN for New York Times