Write If You Get Work: The Best Of Bob & Ray – Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding, 1975 ★★★

Dipping into the Surreal

For over forty years, two men who dressed like Rotary Club members and rarely raised their voices conducted a quiet comedy revolution. Today, the legacy of Bob & Ray rests in hundreds of circulated radio recordings, fond memories of aging fans, and out-of-print books like this which collect their sketches.

I wanted Write If You Get Work: The Best Of Bob & Ray to justify my love with page after page of sheer laughter. Despite my deep nostalgia, I can’t claim this to be all that gut-busting. What it does is capture the essence of what they did, a slightly surreal, lightly barbed whimsy that marked them for decades as the gentlest and wittiest of media satirists.

There’s a story about Monty Python, how a BBC executive turning channels happened upon a singularly brilliant Python sketch, only to realize after minutes of giggling he was watching an actual nature documentary. Bob & Ray worked the same way, gliding deeper by degrees into full-blown absurdity as if daring the audience to catch on.

In Write If You Get Work, a panel show descends into a series of repeated quotations which make less and less sense. A national spelling bee contest becomes a wanton display of easy-word favoritism. A presidential impersonator frustrates an interviewer by portraying a number of pre-20^th century chief executives saying mundane things in the exact same speaking voice.

Bob & Ray as they were. Though they appeared on television many times, radio was their forte. As one of their characters says to another: "Sir, you don't have to smile perpetually, this is radio."
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Bob & Ray attempt to offload their overstocked collection of melted chocolate Easter bunnies as something they dub “wobblies:”

BOB: These wobblies are not only appropriate for any season, but the kiddies will have great fun trying to guess what the wobblies are supposed to represent.

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were radio announcers in Boston when they paired up in 1946 to fill airtime with improvised comedy routines. By the 1950s, they were on national television and radio, doing running scripted parodies of such things as soap operas, game shows, and the Army-McCarthy hearings. Never a huge ratings magnet, they nevertheless were beloved by many who knew them.

By 1975, they were working local for New York radio station WOR-AM, performing a mix of new material and old favorites. That program ended in 1976, not before they were able to publish for the first time a collection of vintage Bob & Ray radio sketches.

Five years prior to Write If You Get Work, Bob & Ray reintroduced themselves to the comedy scene with a successful Broadway show, "Bob & Ray: The Two And Only" Several of the sketches performed there are featured in the book.
Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/alcue/51897012964/

In a glowing Foreword, Kurt Vonnegut marvels at the high even quality of Bob & Ray’s work over the breadth of their run. “This book contains about one ten-thousandth of their output, I would imagine,” Vonnegut writes. “And it might be exciting to say that it represents the cream of the cream of the cream of their jokes. But the truth is that there has been an amazing evenness to their performances.”

Bob & Ray always were funny. Several of the sketches are flat-out brilliant, like the children’s technology show “Mr. Science:”

JIMMY: Gosh-all hemlock, Mr. Science. What’s that piece of laboratory equipment you’re lighting with a match.

MR. SCIENCE: This device is called a candle, Jimmy.

JIMMY: A candle! Holy suffering catfish. Wait’ll I tell all the kids at school I’ve seen one of those.

MR. SCIENCE: Now, just try to keep your enthusiasm under control, boy.

Bob & Ray did appear in print before Write If You Get Work, such as spotlight articles in early issues of MAD Magazine. The artist here, Mort Drucker, also provides caricatures in Write If You Get Work showcasing B&R in the guises of many of their alter egos.
Image from https://weirdocorner.blogspot.com/2010/12/bob-and-ray-and-mad.html

Yet this isn’t exactly a “cream of the cream” collection. Along with many good sketches, you do get some duds. Bob & Ray found fame in the 1950s, and by 1975 were trying to catch up with new parodies of established shows like “Mannix” and “Bonanza.” These and other send-ups are here, too on-the-nose for Bob & Ray’s offbeat comedy brand.

The inherent restrictions of the Bob & Ray format clang more in print, stripped of sly delivery and voice humor. Because there were only ever two cast members, you get a certain monotony, though they do break out a multi-character mystery send-up here that’s both hilarious and dizzily hard to follow. The button-down nature of Bob & Ray is at the core of their comedy but also lends a sameness to much of the written material.

Classic B&R never stayed on one idea too long. They rambled, sometimes making forays into cringe comedy, though never with overt cruelty. Here, sportscaster Biff Burns interviews bitter old baseball player Stuffy Hodgson, where Bob’s Biff prods Ray’s grouchy Stuffy with digs at how he let himself get fat. A reunion of siblings separated for 60 years comically drags until you realize they were better left apart.

Even when sending up a staid interview show, Bob & Ray found ways to keep it surreal. Here, on their early 1950s NBC-TV program, they conduct a sketch where one of them interviews the other about being a beekeeper. Not sure who is doing the interviewing.
Image from https://eyesofageneration.com/the-ones-and-onlys-bob-and-raybob-elliott-and-ray-goulding-began-as-radio/

BOB: You told us last time, Holden, that you’d moved from New York to Idaho to save thirty percent off your utility bills. But most of our callers couldn’t do that…. They couldn’t commute from there to here….

MERKLEY: Why not? It only costs me about $575 a week. You see, there’s a small airline that gives bargain rates if you help them unload the mailbags at every stop.

The best sketches time-release their zaniness with dry explanations or petty squabbles. The children’s educational program, “Prodigy Street,” gets physical after Wally the Word Man keeps horning in on the math lessons of his partner, Mr. Wise Old Owl, to make spelling points:

OWL: Wally, nobody needs to know how it’s spelled to do arithmetic. For all I know, Einstein couldn’t spell it.

WALLY: Well, I don’t think our producer is going to be too happy to hear you implying to the boys and girls that Einstein was illiterate.

The first sketch in the book, “Wally Ballou And The Cranberry Grower,” is one of their best-known. It turns out while he’s been growing them all his life, this farmer has no idea what cranberries are used for, a point gradually revealed during over the interview. The back-and-forth is clever, especially as Wally the interviewer attempts to gin up enthusiasm for his wayward man-on-the-street report, though it demonstrates something of the selective nature of Bob & Ray’s appeal.

Bob as Wally Ballou (at right) interviews Ray as Ward Smith, the cranberry grower. It turns out Smith is great at growing cranberries, but not so knowledgeable about what to do with them after: "I've been selling them in a basket, like strawberries. For cranberry shortcake. And you know...they really don't sell that way?"
Image from https://rockysmith.net/2009/04/12/a-sense-of-the-ridiculous/

Much of their humor harkens back to the lost world of radio, of announcers who tell you the following program is brought to you by “the Monongahela Metal Foundry, maker of extra shiny steel ingots for home and office use.”

A do-it-yourselfer shows how he protects against flooding by lining his basement with hundreds of used Band-Aids, while the “Lassie”-inspired “Tippy The Wonder Dog” features the title character sent out alone to fetch board and nails in preparation for a gathering storm. He returns with a pie tin. Bob & Ray were not very political and certainly not scatological, but their humor is at least not hogtied to yesterday’s news.

About the only reference to 1970s culture in the whole book may be when Bob & Ray pitch a scheme to sell viewers a chance to change their names to those of famous people:

RAY: Finally, we have this letter from a lady in Oregon: “Life has taken on a new meaning for me since I became Gladys Knight and the Pips. I can never thank you enough.” And it’s signed “All of us.”

Write If You Get Work offers an amusing if surface-level sampling of their special chemistry which likely won’t blow you away today with laughter. But after reading through it, you will feel like you have visited a wonderfully loopy world just a few degrees off the axis of reality.