The Bob & Ray era was winding down when this third and final volume of their collected sketches came out in 1985. More a hit and miss compilation than their first two books, The New! Improved! Bob & Ray Book at least starts out on something of a roll.
In a broadcast studio, a man in the audience introduces himself as “one of the very few people in America with a name that is completely unpronounceable,” which he spells W-W-Q-L-C-W: “I’d like to say hello to my brother on your program, but I don’t know how to pronounce his name, either.
A hard-luck would-be anthropologist explains how he spent all his money trying to discover a tribe of uncontacted natives somewhere in New York City: “My brother-in-law was here about a year ago. And he said he ran into some people out in Queens who seemed awfully crude to him. But I haven’t found any trace of them yet.”
Big Steve Wurbler explains why “low jumping”, i.e. leaping from a high place, should be an Olympic sport: “In high jumping, you can strain a muscle or hurt yourself on the way up. But in low jumping, you only have to worry about what happens to you on the way down.”
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| In 1985 Bob & Ray often appeared in commercials, like this one for Arizona Bank. They plied a lucrative side career in marketing, with the credo that humor could help sponsors deliver a message better by amusing rather than boring viewers. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcc6eOoSL5Y |
The death of Ray Goulding in 1990 brought an end to the comedy partnership that began in 1946 filling time on a Boston radio station and became an early, enduring cornerstone of mass-media satire. In their final decade, Goulding and partner Bob Elliott worked steadily, mostly on public radio and in many commercials that gave them a steady income. They also published more collections of their sketches.
The New! Improved! Bob & Ray Book is less of a career overview than were their prior two books, Write If You Get Work: The Best Of Bob & Ray and From Approximately Coast To Coast…It’s The Bob & Ray Show. The sketches here seem concentrated around more recent material, with many mock interviews and fewer show parodies. This time there is linking material between the bits, including a pair of running-gag bulletins. I guess the idea is to give it more of a radio program transcript feel, but it drags the pace to a crawl.
The accent on newer material is also a drawback. By 1985, Bob & Ray were reworking old concepts rather than building up fresh material. As sharp and witty as they were, there was a structural element to Bob & Ray’s best comedy, a kind of interior offbeat logic unique to the pair, which simply doesn’t come off as well in a series of sketches of men being interviewed over and over again.
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| Bob and Ray in a sketch from their 1952 TV show with Audrey Meadows, not yet famous from "The Honeymooners." The kinescopes of these shows, like the radio material performed at the same time, reveal a more anarchic style of comedy than their later work. Photo by Allan Grant from https://images.google.com/hosted/life/a8435f21e0d63f59.html |
There is still a good deal of funny material. In “Stretching Your Dollars,” a home economics expert suggests ways of saving grocery money by zeroing in on less palatable food items:
MERKLEY: You can also get those little gnarled, misshapen carrots quite inexpensively. Nobody wants them because they look icky and they’re tough. But they can’t kill you.
BOB: Well, I’m sure it would be an important factor in this woman’s food shopping to find items that won’t kill her family.
A presidential hopeful who already calls himself “The Right Honorable G. L. Hummerbeck” explains why he is running on both party tickets:
HUMMERBECK: I think most politicians make a big mistake when they put all their eggs in one basket. And, I figure I double my chances by running on both sides.
Strangely, though, the material takes a dip after the first hundred pages. It’s not terrible, just straining at laughs and lacking for that same broad whimsy and merry illogic hardwired to that alternate state of mind Bob & Ray and their listeners called home.
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| Ray Goulding (at left) and Bob Elliott as they appeared on "Late Night With David Letterman" in November 1983. By the mid-1980s, the best chance to watch the pair was on interview shows, where they would often jump right into a new or familiar skit. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9jvhuUZNVI |
I remember feeling that way about the semi-regular NPR show the pair did in their last years together, which was airing in 1985. In the foreword to their first book of sketches, Kurt Vonnegut marveled at the evenness of Bob & Ray’s material over the decades, and listening to some of those recordings myself, I concur. There was always a baseline of excellence. Here, however, the writing often comes off punchy.
A sketch called “Wall Street On Parade” features a talking-head panel of financial experts who opine at length, and fairly dryly, about the stock market and investment strategies. One guy keeps saying “I don’t understand” over and over, apparently because he is having audio issues, but the others keep taking his interjections as debate points.
Family man Ken Vose is praised for his fidelity to his family, but it turns out he lives on the other side of the country and never sees them, a fact dragged out over the course of the sketch. Many of the interview shows involve con men who give bad advice at best and often use callers as marks for obvious scams.
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Garrison Keillor of "The Prairie Home Companion" fame contributes a foreword to the New! Improved! Bob & Ray book. It rambles a bit, but makes a good point about their often-bootlegged material making the rounds with collectors: "Let me give you guys some advice: don't ever cheat a writer. Don't even think about it." Photo by Bernard Gotfryd from https://www.loc.gov/item/2020731595/ |
As I learned from reading their authorized biography, Bob And Ray: Keener Than Most Persons, Ray was a very sick man by this time in their career, struggling with kidney disease and dialysis treatments. While the pair always had outside help in the writing department, Ray’s health challenges must have hampered their usual high creativity as a working team.
In their more classic mold, Bob & Ray sketches have a vibe about them, a genial, relaxed quality that might have belonged in a different time. The 1980s were seen as the decade of greed, something I usually dismiss as a canard except here it seems to infect the material. If it isn’t shady speculators, it is the grasping plutocrats of “Garish Summit” who live lives of conspicuous consumption while forcing their servants to celebrate Christmas in a chilly root cellar for a prescribed 45 minutes.
That said, I do find “Garish Summit” funny, if not as enjoyably B&R as their better-known soap opera sketches of decades before like “The Gathering Dusk” and “Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife.” If I wanted to be fairer, I’d admit they did change up their material in ways that sometimes challenged longtime fans like me, and maybe that wasn’t as easy to warm up to as it should have been.
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| A nice bonus from the publication of New! Improved! was the release of this audiobook, which collects the best sketches from the book as performed by Bob & Ray themselves, complete with sound effects. I just wished they had done more of them, as the material comes off better than in the books. Image from https://www.amazon.com/New-Improved-Bob-Ray-Book/dp/0945353480 |
They do include several sketches in the book I recognize from a classic performance at Carnegie Hall the year before, including the one of the champion low jumper and a bank announcement that captures at once the charm and illogic that encapsulate Bob & Ray at their best:
RAY: The folks at the Friendly National Chemical Loan & Trust Company have lost the records of the bank – the records of your deposits and withdrawals. Now, if you could come into our main office at the corner of 57th and 11th and tell us honestly how much you have in there, we’d be much obliged. We’ll take your word for it.
BOB: It sounds like a big problem, but it isn’t really – if we all play fair and are honest about it. Thank you.
Other callbacks to better days include an episode of “Tippy The Wonder Dog” as well as “Hobby Hut,” where host Neil Clummer meets a man who collects numbers held by people who wait in line, marveling at how he amassed 1,200 examples in just four years. The collector explains: “Well, when you just take a number and leave – it doesn’t take as long as taking a number and waiting to be served.”
It’s not killer material, but it works well enough at capturing the spirit of buttoned-down zaniness Bob & Ray made their turf for so long. And there is enough like it here to make it a worthwhile for fans who already have the first two books and, like me, are left wanting more.
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