The New! Improved! Bob & Ray Book – Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding, 1985 ★★

Curtain Call

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.”

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 ratings than as 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 overstocked surplus sales and soap operas.

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 Rotarians 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.

Bob And Ray: Keener Than Most Persons – David Pollack, 2013 ★★★

Two for the Show

These days, surrealism is well-established as a basis for comedy. You don’t even have to get laughs if you can twist what passes for reality in a uniquely enjoyable way. It wasn’t always so.

In the 1940s and 1950s, comedic premises were fairly square and straightforward. People did jokes and sketches and then played music or sold war bonds or whatever. There were cartoons and the Three Stooges, but those were widely seen as being for kids.

Then in 1946, two announcers found themselves on the radio together in Boston, Massachusetts, and American comedy began to change.

Daddy’s Boy – Chris Elliott with Bob Elliott, 1989 ★★½

Man-Child Looks Back in Anger

What’s it like being the product of an overbearing celebrity parent? You know the type, pushing you into the public eye and molding you into their own image, to the point of dressing you in an ascot and shaving your head to match their own receding hairline.

This was the fate of one Chris Elliott, son of fabled entertainer Bob Elliott, as he relates in this no-holds-barred pity party of a memoir, subtitled “A Son’s Shocking Account Of Life With A Famous Father.”

Before the short memoir is completed, Chris has survived morbid obesity, a capsized ocean liner, a humiliating thumb-wresting match, and his father skipping his high school graduation to get his neck hair trimmed at the barber shop next door.

MAD Strikes Back! – Harvey Kurtzman, 1955 ★★½

Taking a MAD Look Back

Last month came further evidence of the Apocalypse: MAD magazine rebooted itself. After a run of 550 issues begun in 1952, the humor staple officially rehauled itself with a new Issue #1. Readers of the latest ish were greeted by new staff, new logo, and new overall design.

The Best Humor Annual – Edited by Louis Untermeyer & Ralph E. Shikes, 1952 ★

Laffs on Not Quite Every Page

Read some old books, and you wonder what they ever did to deserve consignment to a quick obscurity. Other old books show Father Time tough but fair. Take this exhaustive but underwhelming compendium of humorous writings published in 1951-1952.