From Approximately Coast To Coast…It’s The Bob And Ray Show – Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding, 1983 ★★★

Taking On The Eighties

A new decade brung with it a second collection of Bob & Ray sketches. By this time the comedians had become enshrined in that temple of culture, National Public Radio, who platformed the pair throughout the 1980s less for rating than a kind of public service.

Would the duo who built their reputation darting from one commercial broadcaster to another every other year or so become stuffy and dull with their non-profit status?

It doesn’t seem that way. The material here is at times sharper and funnier than what was in the first book, though you do feel time beginning to pass them by with their continued parodying of overstuffed surplus sales and soap operas.

It was our loss. Who doesn’t miss an era when you could enjoy some good flypaper humor?

BOB: Friends – do you have trouble putting insect poison in out of the way places where your bird won’t eat it? If so, it’s time you switched to Einbinder Flypaper for the sake of your defenseless pet. Impartial laboratory tests show that flypaper is seldom fatal to parakeets – even when they fly directly into it.

A winner of a most beautiful face contest – who happens to be a man – says his regimen for staying beautiful includes a fresh razor every day and walking with his back to the wind. A guest on “Hard Luck Stories” explains why he wants a giraffe for his house: “You just put him in the front yard and act casual about it, while the neighbors turn green with envy.”

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, as drawn by Al Hirschfeld. They are depicted in familiar roles, Bob as roving reporter Wally Ballou, Ray as an avuncular man on the street who has very firm ideas about something which turns out to be ridiculous.
Image from https://www.theattic.space/home-page-blogs/2022/9/15/the-dryest-of-the-dry-wits

The same gentle, meandering wit that sparkled across the pages of Write If You Get Work: The Best Of Bob And Ray lights up this collection of material performed by Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding. It includes a mix of older classic sketches passed over in Write If You Get Work alongside more recent bits, some of them performed on television.

The originators of some of the best sketch comedy of the 1950s and 1960s now drew from imitators, not heavily but sometimes perceptibly. They were getting more political, with some pointedly sarcastic jabs at what were being called Reaganomics at the time.

In a particularly ruthless sketch, Wally Ballou visits a paperclip factory that produces boxes of one hundred clips at ten cents each. He asks how they can manage it:

PIERCE: We have a very low wage structure. Here, again, we’ve been able to hold the line on costs. Our average worker makes about fourteen cents a week.

BALLOU: Well how in the world can anybody live on that?

PIERCE: We don’t pry in the personal lives of our employees, Wally. But I understand that most of our people live in caves out at the edge of town. And they forage for food.

A year after From Approximately Coast To Coast, Bob & Ray appeared for two nights at Carnegie Hall, May 31 & June 2, 1984, in what was billed "A Night Of Two Stars." Half the show was devoted to classic sketches, the other half to new ones written for their NPR program. I was there June 2, and can report it was a triumph.
Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Osf27t_Q1nk

Other pieces make fun of the often-arrogant media types, like a reporter standing outside Buckingham Palace demanding then-Prince Charles come out and reward him with an interview: “I know you’re in there, Charlie! And the longer you hold out, the longer I’m gonna be.”

A Bob & Ray editorial favoring leashes for cats, hamsters, and other pets draws an angry listener response from a representative of the National Society of Friends of the Four-Legged. After telling the activist he can’t be surprised at the hostility he encountered in the studio for giving an opposing view, Bob sends him off by calling “a little shrimp.”

Bob later parodies television commentator David Brinkley, a revered ABC News pundit of the time. Even without hearing Elliott’s expert mimicry, the joke at Brinkley’s puffy cadence comes through as he opines on a previous speaker: “With some degree of circumlocutory skill, he has couched the absinthian vehemence of his address in a periphrastic bit of casuistry, which is paralogistic on the one hand and incapacious on the other.”

Bob and Ray with "Saturday Night Live" stars Gilda Radner (left) and Jane Curtin (right), promoting their 1979 NBC-TV special "Bob & Ray, Jane, Laraine & Gilda." There was much cross-pollination between B&R and SNL, including Bob's son and granddaughter joining the SNL cast. This show's highlight, had the four and Laraine Newman cover Rod Stewart's new hit "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy." They really sell it, too!
Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078888/ 

Bob & Ray were reaching for relevance by parodying newer models of entertainment. The 1980s saw a run of successful prime-time soaps like “Dynasty” and “Dallas,” so Bob & Ray introduced “Garrish Summit,” where super-rich Agatha Murchfield is confronted by a man claiming to be her son, which she can’t recall giving birth to but seems too idle and jaded to be especially bothered about. Meanwhile, her legitimate son seethes at the imposter while spending his time counting paper clips.

Paper clips are a comedy motif in this collection; so are ingots, with several ads for Monongahela Metal Foundry sprinkled across the book:

RAY: Remember, too, ladies – you know how ashamed you feel serving dinner guests when there are dull, corroded steel ingots piled up on the table. That’s why the folks at Monongahela have introduced new, extra shiny ingots for home and office use.

This book also includes perhaps Bob & Ray’s best-known and beloved sketch. Unfortunately, I hate it. “Slow Talkers Of America” features the president of an organization devoted to doing just that, while driving Ray the interviewer to distraction with his endlessly running answers to simple questions. The ponderousness of it is the joke itself, but it’s also a bear for those of us who find it played out after the first few times.

A classic that holds its value much better, “The Komodo Dragon Expert,” gives Bob as the expert the misfortune of being interviewed by a thoroughly inattentive Ray, who is clearly not paying attention to the expert’s answers. The result is a veritable echo chamber of answer-and-question.

BOB: The Komodo dragon is the world's largest living lizard...It's found on the steep-sloped island of Komodo in the lesser Sunda Chain of the Indonesian Archipelago and in the nearby islands of Rinja, Padar, and Flores.
RAY: Where do they come from?
Image of actual Komodo dragon from https://www.colchesterzoologicalsociety.com/animals-and-habitats/enclosure-pages/dragons-of-komodo/ 

A collector of misshapen fruit and vegetables has to admit that without adequate refrigeration he has spent his life amassing bags full of rotting trash. “But of course, I can visualize what each item looked like when it was still fresh,” he sadly offers.

There are some pleasant returns to old standards, like a Biff Burns sports feature, Mr. I-Know-Where-They-Are digging up yesterday’s celebrities, and Fred Falvy, the Do-It-Yourselver, making lampshades for naked bulb sockets because who wants to buy them at a store?

Alfred E. Nelson has written a history of the United States showing President Lincoln riding in a limousine, among sundry other mistakes, which Bob calls out:

BOB: And worst of all, it sells, I understand, for eighty-nine ninety-five, which is a ridiculous price.

NELSON: It’s leatherbound.

Ray as Alfred E. Nelson explains why he misidentified the Father Of Our Country as "Nelson Washington" in a performance of the history book sketch on "Late Night With David Letterman" sometime in the early 1980s. "I was just thinking of my own last name, I guess," he says. "It's an honest mistake."
Image from https://jackshalom.net/2016/03/13/history-of-the-us-with-bob-and-ray/

The book opens with a Foreword by Andy Rooney, who writes: “Both Bob and Ray are interesting to meet separately because two duller people you never talked to.” Wonder if he came to the book party?

There are some dullish pieces in this collection, though fewer than in their first book. What made the first book so enjoyable was how it was written for radio, a medium that suited Bob & Ray’s dry personas, while this has more of a television focus, where they made less of a mark.

Overall, though, this book is very entertaining, with wonderfully goofy pieces like an interview with a professional minder of P’s and Q’s, who pines instead to watch over people’s T’s or W’s but prefers not to explain what exactly his job entails: “I don’t want to say how I do it exactly. As it is now, I don’t have many competitors.”

This is true for Bob & Ray, too, all these years later.