Freberg began making satirical recordings for Capitol Records, beginning with "John and Marsha" and "Ragtime Dan," recorded on February 10, 1951. He scored a huge success with "John and Marsha," released in both 45-rpm and 78-rpm formats, a soap opera parody that consisted of the title characters (both played by Freberg) repeating each other's names. In a 1954 follow-up, he used pedal steel guitarist Speedy West to parody the 1953 Ferlin Husky country hit, "A Dear John Letter," as "A Dear John and Marsha Letter" (Capitol 2677).

With Daws Butler and June Foray, he produced his 1951 Dragnet parody, "St. George and the Dragonet." The latter recording was a #1 hit for four weeks in late 1953; on the record's B-side "Little Blue Riding Hood," the title character is arrested for smuggling goodies. After "I've Got You Under My Skin" (1952), he followed with more popular musical satires, including "Sh-Boom" (1954), "The Yellow Rose of Texas" (1955), and "The Great Pretender" (1956).

He spoofed Elvis Presley in 1956 with his own version of Elvis' first gold record, "Heartbreak Hotel", in which the echo chamber goes out of control. (In his spoof, Freberg's Elvis rips his jeans during his performance, a problem the real Elvis had with jumpsuits when performing in the early 1970s.)

Another hit to get the Freberg treatment was Johnnie Ray's weepy "Cry", which Freberg rendered as "Try" ("You too can be unhappy... if you try!"), exaggerating Ray's histrionic vocal style. Ray was furious, until he realised the success of Freberg's 1952 parody was helping sales and airplay of his own record.

Freberg's "Banana Boat (Day-O)" satirised Harry Belafonte's popular recording of "Banana Boat Song". In Freberg's version, the lead singer is forced to run down the hall and close the door after him to muffle the sound of his "Day-O!" because the beatnik-styled bongo drummer complains, "It's too piercing, man". When he gets to the lyric about "A beautiful bunch a'ripe banana/Hide the deadly black tarantula" the drummer protests, "I don't dig spiders, man."

He also used the beatnik-musician theme in a parody of "The Great Pretender," the hit by The Platters, who, like Belafonte and Welk, were not pleased. This musician was a pianist, an Erroll Garner devotee who rebels against playing a single-chord accompaniment. He retorts, "I'm not playing that 'pling-pling-pling jazz'!" But Freberg is adamant about the pianist sticking to The Platters' style: "You play 'that pling-pling-pling jazz'--or you don't get paid tonight!" The pianist relents--sort of.

Freberg's musical parodies were a byproduct of his collaborations with Billy May and his Capitol Records producer Ken Nelson. With his 1957 spoof of TV "champagne music" master Lawrence Welk, "Wun'erful! Wun'erful!", Freberg had a true parody partner with May, a veteran big band musician and jazz arranger.

To replicate Welk's syrupy sound, May and some of Hollywood's finest studio musicians and vocalists worked to clone Welk's musical mediocrity, right down to bad notes and timing mistakes. Billy Liebert, a first-rate accordionist, copied Welk's accordion playing. Welk denied he had ever said, "Wunnerful, Wunnerful!", yet it became the title of Welk's autobiography (Prentice Hall, 1971). In his parody record, the orchestra is overwhelmed by the bubble machine and eventually floats out to sea.

Freberg also tackled political issues of the day. On his radio show, an extended sketch paralleled the Cold War brinkmanship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union by portraying an ever-escalating public relations battle between the El Sodom and the Rancho Gomorrah, two casinos in the city of Los Varoces (Spanish for "The Greedy Ones", a thinly-disguised Las Vegas).

The sketch ends with the ultimate tourist attraction, the Hydrogen Bomb, which turns Los Varoces into a barren, vast wasteland. Network pressure forced Freberg to remove the reference to the hydrogen bomb and destroy the two cities with an earthquake instead. The version of "Incident at Los Varoces" released later on Capitol Records contains the original ending.

On two occasions, Capitol balked at releasing Freberg's creations. "That's Right, Arthur" was a barbed parody of controversial 1950s radio-TV personality Arthur Godfrey, who expected his stable of performers, known as "Little Godfreys," to endlessly toady to him. The dialogue included Freberg's "Godfrey" monologue, punctuated by Daws Butler, imitating Godfrey announcer Tony Marvin, repeatedly interjecting, "That's right, Arthur," between Godfrey's comments. Capitol feared Godfrey might take legal action. Capitol also rejected the equally acerbic "Most of the Town," a spoof on Ed Sullivan. Both eventually surfaced on a box-set Freberg retrospective issued by Rhino Records.

Freberg continued to skewer the advertising industry after the demise of his show, producing and recording "Green Chri$tma$" in 1958 (again with Butler), a scathing indictment of the overcommercialization of the holiday. Freberg, the son of a church minister and religious himself, made sure to soberly point out "whose birthday we're celebrating" on that record.

Released originally on 45-rpm discs, the satire ended abruptly with a rendition of "Jingle Bells" punctuated by cash register sounds when reissued by Capitol on LP and CD. Freberg also revisited the Dragnet theme, with "Christmas Dragnet", in which the straight-laced detective convinces a character named "Grudge" that Santa Claus really exists. Daws Butler does several voices on that record.

Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume One: The Early Years (1961) combined dialogue and song in a musical theater format. The original album musical, released on Capitol, parodies the history of the United States from 1492 until the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783.

Freberg parodied both large and small aspects of history. For instance, in the Colonial era, it was common to use the long s, which resembles a lowercase f, in the middle of words; thus, as Ben Franklin is reading the Declaration of Independence, he questions the passage, "Life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff?" He also takes the time to skewer McCarthyism, as his Franklin talks about "signing a few harmless documents, forgetting all about it, and years later finding oneself in front of a committee."