Боб и Рэй: История американского комедийного дуэта

American comedy duo
the real life Tex Blaisdell

Bob and Ray were an American comedy duo whose career spanned five decades, composed of comedians Bob Elliott (1923–2016) and Ray Goulding (1922–1990). The duo's format was typically to satirize the medium in which they were performing, such as conducting radio or television interviews, with off the wall dialogue presented in a generally deadpan style as though it were a serious broadcast.

Elliott and Goulding began as radio announcers (Elliott a disc jockey and Goulding a newscaster) in Boston with their own separate programs on station WHDH, and each would visit with the other while on the air. Their informal banter was so appealing that WHDH would call on them, as a team, to fill in when Red Sox baseball broadcasts were rained out. Elliott and Goulding (not yet known as Bob and Ray) would improvise comedy routines all afternoon, and joke around with studio musicians. Elliott and Goulding's brand of humor caught on, and WHDH gave them their own weekday show in 1946. Matinee with Bob and Ray was originally a 15 minute show, soon expanding to half an hour. (When explaining why Bob was billed first, Goulding claimed that it was because Matinee with Bob and Ray sounded better than Matinob with Ray and Bob.) Their trademark sign off was "This is Ray Goulding reminding you to write if you get work"; "Bob Elliott reminding you to hang by your thumbs."

Matinee with Bob and Ray was broadcast Monday through Saturday on WHDH. The weekday half hours were broadcast live; the Saturday shows were usually 25 minutes long and were sometimes recorded in advance. Staff musicians Ken Wilson (organ) and Bill Green (piano) opened each show with a sprightly rendition of "Collegiate". Fans who are familiar with Bob and Ray's later routines, which were carefully scripted and timed, might be surprised by surviving episodes of Matinee with Bob and Ray. These shows were completely impromptu and always irreverent, demonstrating how very alert and quick witted Bob and Ray were. They would follow any comic thread for a few minutes, and then just as suddenly abandon it to move on to another topic. If Ray happened to mention a distant city, Bob would solemnly introduce a travelogue and the pair would narrate a mock documentary. A chance remark about a labor saving device would bring home economics expert Mary Margaret McGoon (Ray) to the microphone, offering an unlikely recipe or promoting a useless appliance. If an idea ran out of steam, Bob and Ray's cowboy entertainer Tex Blaisdell (voiced by Bob in a laconic drawl) came out of nowhere to plug his latest personal appearance in some tenth rate theater. Almost all of the incidental characters passing through the studio were named Sturdley, which became a buzzword of the series. A regular feature of Matinee with Bob and Ray was a soap opera parody, "The Life and Loves of Linda Lovely". Ray would portray Linda, using a soft, breathy falsetto, with Bob portraying her beloved David in a halting, deliberate baritone. Neither Bob nor Ray knew what each story would involve, so each would cue the other and bat the dialogue back and forth as each situation got out of hand. A 1948 broadcast had Linda suddenly interrupting the story to take an urgent phone call, only to have David counter this turn of events by taking his own call; then Linda announced someone at the door and took a third phone call, which David accepted while Linda greeted the guest at the door and took a fourth phone call. When the show took time out for a recorded commercial, the team would continue in the same vein. A testimonial by actor Basil Rathbone would be followed by Bob and Ray adopting British accents and outlining a mystery. A commercial for a toy dealer would result in Bob immediately introducing a children's story as told by "Uncle Ray". Beginning in October 1948 they satirized a regularly scheduled singing commercial for Mission Bell Wines, which called for an announcer to read the ad copy live between the opening chorus and the closing jingle. Bob and Ray took any number of liberties, singing the copy drunkenly or punctuating the written copy with sarcastic remarks. Musicians Wilson and Green performed two selections during each show. Bob and Ray often dragged them into the action, with comments about their clothes, their vacation plans, their musicianship, or their work ethic (Ray: "I don't care if you two have Petrillo behind you, you always come in here thinking you own the place."). One episode had Bob and Ray commenting on a Wilson Green duet and then discussing the many success stories of the Wilson and Green School of Music. These were all voiced by Bob and Ray, all awful musicians, and all named Sturdley. Although Matinee with Bob and Ray did not have a studio audience, local residents (often high school and college students) dropped by the studio daily to watch Bob and Ray. The team's wilder flights of fancy would elicit laughter off mike.

Matinee with Bob and Ray became a favorite with listeners in New England, which brought Elliott and Goulding to the attention of NBC in New York. They continued on the air for over four decades on the NBC, CBS, and Mutual networks, and on New York City stations WINS, WOR, and WHN. From 1973 to 1976, they were the afternoon drive hosts on WOR, doing a four hour show. In their last incarnation, they were heard on National Public Radio, ending in 1987. They were regulars on NBC's Monitor, often on standby to go on the air at short notice if the program's planned segments developed problems, and they were also heard in a surprising variety of formats and time slots, from a 15 minute series in mid afternoon to their hourlong show aired weeknights just before midnight in 1954–55. During that same period, they did an audience participation game show, Pick and Play with Bob and Ray, which was short lived. It came at a time when network pages filled seats for radio TV shows by giving tickets to anyone in the street, and on Pick and Play the two comics were occasionally booed by audience members unfamiliar with the Bob and Ray comedy style. Some of their radio episodes were released on recordings, and others were adapted into graphic story form for publication in MAD magazine. Their earlier shows were mostly ad libbed, but later programs relied more heavily on scripts. While Bob and Ray created and improvised much of their material, they did accept sketches from writers. The first was Boston broadcaster Jack Beauvais, who had performed as a singer for WEEI in Boston during the 1930s and also worked for some of the big bands in the 1940s and 1950s. The pioneering radio humorist Raymond Knight was a fan, and submitted ideas and sketches. (Bob Elliott later married Knight's widow.) The most prolific freelance author was Tom Koch (pronounced "Cook"). In 1955 he was a staff writer for Monitor, and he sent Elliott and Goulding 10 bits. "They bought eight," recalled Koch, "so I sent them 10 more and they never did reject another one." Koch always submitted his work by interoffice or postal mail, and although Elliott and Goulding spoke with him in person occasionally, the working relationship was remote: "The check would come and that would be it." Koch captured the Bob and Ray style so well that the team would recite from his scripts verbatim. Koch remained with Elliott and Goulding, off and on, for three decades.

Spoofs of other radio programs were another staple, including the continuing soap operas "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife", "One Fella's Family", and "Aunt Penny's Sunlit Kitchen" (which spoofed Backstage Wife, One Man's Family, and Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories, respectively). "Mary Backstayge" was serialized for such a long period of time that it became better known to many listeners than the show it lampooned. Another soap opera spoof, "Garish Summit" (which Bob and Ray performed during their stint on National Public Radio in the 1980s), recounts the petty squabbles for power among the wealthy family members who own a lead mine. They also satirized Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons with the continuing parody, "Mr. Trace, Keener than Most Persons". Each Mr. Trace sketch began with a simple plot that soon degenerated into total gibberish where the dialogue was concerned ("Mister Treat, Chaser of Lost Persons", "Thanks for the vote of treedle, Pete") and gunplay ("You You've shot me! I'm dead."). Juvenile adventures were given the satiric treatment: Jack Armstrong became "Jack Headstrong", and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet became "Lawrence Fechtenberger, Interstellar Officer Candidate." The quiz show "Dr. I. Q., the Mental Banker" was parodied as "Dr. O. K., the Sentimental Banker". Whereas the real Dr. I. Q. had several assistants with remote microphones, scattered through the audience to select contestants, Dr. O. K. (Bob) had to make do with a single assistant (Ed Sturdley, played by Ray), who eventually became exhausted from running around the theater. Other continuing parodies (both generic and specific) included game shows ("The 64 Cent Question"), children's shows ("Mr. Science", "Tippy the Wonder Dog", "Matt Neffer, Boy Spot Welding King of the World"), self help seminars ("Dr. Joyce Dunstable"), and foreign intrigue ("Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy"). In 1959 Bob and Ray launched a successful network radio series for CBS, broadcast from New York, known colloquially by a shortening of Goulding's wry introduction: Bob & Ray Present the CBS Radio Network. The CBS programming department frequently supplied scripts promoting the network's dramatic and sports shows, but Bob and Ray never read these scripts entirely straight, and would often imitate the character voices heard on these shows. Gunsmoke and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar were frequent targets, and Johnny Dollar inspired a full fledged parody, "Ace Willoughby, International Detective". In each installment, Willoughby (Ray, doing a letter perfect impersonation of Johnny Dollar star Bob Bailey) traveled around the globe in pursuit of crooks, but always gave up when the crooks found him and kept beating him up. Bob and Ray revisited the Ace Willoughby format a decade later in a parody of the TV detective show Mannix. Their version, called "Blimmix", featured a dimwitted detective and whatever thug served as the antagonist, with Blimmix being beaten up at the end of each segment. In addition to parodies of specific programs and genres, many of Elliott and Goulding's sketches turned on the inherent absurdities of reportage and interviewing. One particularly enduring routine cast Elliott as an expert on the Komodo dragon, and Goulding as the dense reporter whose questions trailed behind the information given. Another featured Elliott as the spokesman for the Slow Talkers of America ("headquarters" in Glens Falls, New York), whose lengthy pauses between words increasingly frustrate Goulding. The pair performed both of these sketches many times. Their character known as "The Worst Person in the World" (a reference to New York magazine theatre critic John Simon, who gave their stage show a negative review) was, many years later, appropriated by MSNBC host Keith Olbermann.

In the early 1950s, the two had their own 15 minute television series, entitled simply Bob & Ray. It began November 26, 1951 on NBC with Audrey Meadows as a cast regular. During the second season, the title changed to Club Embassy, and Cloris Leachman joined the cast as a regular, replacing Audrey Meadows who left the series to join the cast of The Jackie Gleason Show on CBS. In the soap opera parodies, the actresses took the roles of Mary Backstayge and Linda Lovely. Expanding to a half hour for the summer of 1952 only, the series continued until September 28, 1953. When The Higgins Boys and Gruber show began on The Comedy Channel in 1989, it occasionally included full episodes of Bob and Ray's 1951–53 shows (along with episodes of Clutch Cargo and Supercar). The duo did more television in the latter part of their career, beginning with key roles of Bud Williams Jr. (Elliott) and Walter Gesundheit (Goulding) in Kurt Vonnegut's Hugo nominated Between Time and Timbuktu: A Space Fantasy (1972), adapted from several Vonnegut novels and stories. (Vonnegut had once submitted comedy material to Bob and Ray.) Fred Barzyk directed this WGBH/PBS production, a science fiction comedy about an astronaut poet's journey through the Chrono Synclastic Infundibulum. This teleplay was first published in an edition that featured numerous screenshots of Bob and Ray and other cast members. Bob and Ray also hosted a Goodson Todman game show, The Name's the Same, which was emceed originally by Robert Q. Lewis. Bob and Ray would do a brief comedy routine, and then play the normal game of having a celebrity panel try to guess the contestants' famous names. They would always end the show with their traditional closing: Ray saying, "Write if you get work " and Bob finishing with "And hang by your thumbs." The rigid format of the game gave the team little room to indulge their humor, and their run as hosts lasted only 10 weeks. In their final broadcast, they omitted the usual "Write if you get work" closing and simply said, "So long." They were replaced the next week by Clifton Fadiman, who finished out the series. During the late 1950s, Bob and Ray were also on radio and television as the voices of Bert and Harry Piel, two animated characters from a very successful ad campaign for Piels Beer. Since this was a regional beer, the commercials were not seen nationally, but the popularity of the ad campaign resulted in national press coverage. Based on the success of those commercials, they launched a successful advertising voice over company, Goulding Elliott Graybar (so called because the offices were located in New York's Graybar Building). In 1971, Bob and Ray lent their voices to the children's television program The Electric Company in a pair of short animated films; in one, explaining opposites, Ray was the "writer of words", first for elevators, then doors, finally faucets. The other, illustrating words ending in at, had Ray as "Lorenzo the Magnificent" who can read minds and who tries to read a word in Bob's mind, that he thinks is an at word such as "hat", "bat", "rat", "cat", "mat", etc. (Turns out, it wasn't; Bob's word was actually "Columbus".) In 1973, Bob and Ray created an historic television program that was broadcast on two channels: one half of the studio was broadcast on the New York PBS affiliate WNET, and the other half of the studio was broadcast on independent station WNEW. Four sketches were performed, including a tug of war that served as an allegory about nuclear war. The two parts of the program are available for viewing at the Museum of Television & Radio. In 1979, they returned to national TV for a one shot NBC special with members of the original Saturday Night Live cast, Bob & Ray, Jane & Laraine & Gilda. It included a skit (not written by Elliott and Goulding) in which the team sat in chairs, in business suits, facing the audience, nearly motionless, and sang a duet of Rod Stewart's major hit "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" Elliott and Goulding, reviewing the script beforehand, didn't like the idea at all and tried to refuse it, but their deadpan rendition of the song became the hour's highlight. Near the beginning of the program, they announced a contest which would take suggestions for the "new capital of Pennsylvania", not specifically mentioning the very recent Three Mile Island nuclear accident that had taken place near Harrisburg. In 1980, they taped a one hour pilot for CBS late night with the cast of SCTV titled From Cleveland, a sketch show staged on location in Cleveland. The show became a cult favorite with numerous showings at the Museum of Television & Radio. This was followed by a series of specials for PBS in the early 1980s. In 1982, Ray Goulding told the New York Times, "It just keeps happening to us. I suppose each new generation notices that we are there." Bob and Ray also appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show several times in the late 1950s and early '60s; guested on the Johnny Carson and David Letterman shows throughout the 1970s and '80s; provided voices for the animated 1981 special B. C.: A Special Christmas, and made guest appearances on episodes of The David Steinberg Show, Happy Days, and Trapper John, M. D

Elliott and Goulding starred in a pair of two man stage shows: The Two and Only on Broadway in 1970 (featuring a Playbill drawn by Mort Drucker), and A Night of Two Stars at Carnegie Hall in 1984. They also did extensive work in radio and television commercials, and enjoyed supporting roles in the feature films Cold Turkey (1971), where they played caricatures of famous news personalities of that day, and Author! Author! (1982). In 1960, Bob and Ray published a children's book based on some of their characters and routines, Linda Lovely and the Fleebus. The duo also collaborated on three books collecting routines featuring some of their signature characters and routines: Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray (1976; the title referenced Goulding's usual sign off line), From Approximately Coast to Coast: It's The Bob & Ray Show (1983), and The New! Improved! Bob & Ray Book (1985). The team also recorded audiobook versions. Along with the audio books and numerous collections of radio broadcasts, Bob and Ray recorded several albums, including recordings of their stage performances The Two and Only and A Night of Two Stars, Bob and Ray on a Platter, and Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular.

Ray Goulding became ill in the late 1970s, suffering from kidney disease and enduring regular dialysis treatments. He was forced to adjust his working schedule to accommodate his regimen of hospital visits and treatments. Goulding refused to consider a kidney transplant, preferring to continue leading his life as he had been. Because of the new demands on Goulding's time, the team could no longer accept daily radio jobs or extensive advertising campaigns. This reduced their workload somewhat, but the team continued to work together for another decade, as outlined above. Ray Goulding died on March 24, 1990. Elliott continued to perform, most notably with his son (actor/comedian Chris Elliott) on the TV sitcom Get a Life, on episodes of Newhart, LateLine and Late Night with David Letterman, in the films Cabin Boy (also with son Chris) and Quick Change, and on radio for the first season of Garrison Keillor's American Radio Company of the Air. Chris would join the cast of Saturday Night Live for season 20 in 1994, and his daughter Abby also joined the cast midway through season 34 in 2009, marking three generations of Elliotts appearing on the show. Bob and Ray were inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1995. Many of their shows are available for listening at The Paley Center for Media in New York and Los Angeles. The Paley Center has such a large collection of Bob and Ray tapes that many of these remained uncatalogued for years. Bob Elliott died on February 2, 2016, a victim of throat cancer.

Bob and Ray have won three Peabody Awards over the years, in 1951, 1956, and 1982. Bob and Ray were inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in the radio division.