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Bob and Ray were an American comedy duo whose career spanned five decades. Composed of comedians Bob Elliott (1923–2016[1]) 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. (Wikipedia)
Bob and Ray Slow Talkers
26 March 2013 | Joshua Rothman | The New Yorker
Today is the ninetieth birthday of Bob Elliott, of the classic American comedy duo Bob and Ray.
For half a century, starting in 1945, Bob and his partner Ray Goulding, who passed away in 1990, created a unique kind of spoof comedy. On the radio, and, later, on television and stage, Bob and Ray lampooned media culture, creating fake soap operas like “Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife” (a parody of the radio soap “Mary Noble, Backstage Wife”) and interviewing one another while they impersonated various characters, like the incompetent journalist Wally Ballou, the food expert Mary McGoon, who had a recipe for “frozen-marshmallow and ginger-ale salad,” and the sportscaster Biff Burns, who signed off by saying, “This is Biff Burns saying this is Biff Burns saying goodnight.” Much of their comedy was improvised; Bob and Ray took their naturally sonorous radio voices and bent them into every imaginable shape, creating what Whitney Balliett, writing in this magazine in 1982, called “a surrealistic Dickensian repertory company, which chastened the fools of the world with hyperbole, slapstick, parody, verbal nonsense, non sequitur, and sheer wit, all of it clean, subtle, and gentle.”
Nowadays, the sources of Bob and Ray’s routines can be obscure: it’s not always obvious who or what is being parodied. But their sensibility seems absolutely contemporary. Bob and Ray’s comedy-as-media-criticism would be right at home on “The Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report.” In a 1990 Comment, written shortly after Ray Goulding died, Adam Gopnik described them this way:
Their genius was to see before anyone else that the real rhythm of the media culture was stately, slow, and tirelessly attentive. Meticulous consideration of the blatantly absurd; calm interrogation of the thunderingly bizarre; fatuous cheerfulness displayed in the face of the outrageous; the syrup of cordiality poured on the whole range of human dementia—that was what Bob and Ray alone caught, and parodied with a pitch so fine that people tuning in late to their work could take a while to realize that what they were hearing was a joke.
Here, for example, is a typical Bob and Ray routine, featuring Bob as a Komodo-dragon expert (you can listen to a recording, too):
ray: Tonight we’re talking to Darrel Dexter, the Komodo-dragon expert, from Upper Montclair, New Jersey. Say, doctor, would you tell us a little bit about the Komodo dragon?
bob: Happy to! The Komodo dragon is the world’s largest living lizard. It’s a ferocious carnivore found on the steep-sloped island of Komodo, in the lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian archipelago, and the nearby islands of Rintja, Padar, and Flores.
ray: Where do they come from?
bob: [Mystified pause.] The Komodo dragon, world’s largest living lizard, is found on the island of Komodo, in the lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian Archipelago, and the nearby islands of Rinja, Padar, and Flores. We have two in this country that were given to us some years ago by the late former Premier of Indonesia, Sukarno, and they reside in the National Zoo, in Washington.
ray: I, ah, believe I read somewhere, where a foreign potentate gave America some Komodo dragons. Is that true?
bob: [Pause.] Yes. The former Premier of Indonesia, Sukarno, gifted our country with two Komodo dragons—the world’s largest living lizards—and they reside at the National Zoo, in Washington.
ray: Well, now, if we wanted to take the youngsters to see a Komodo dragon—where would we take them?
This is reminiscent of an Ali G. interview—it’s easy to imagine Sacha Baron Cohen asking, as Ray does, “Ah—they’re of the lizard family, aren’t they?” and “Now, ah, do they eat other things, these Komodo dragons?” Baron Cohen, though would be more obvious in making his jokes. Bob and Ray, Gopnik writes, “worked from so deep inside the culture they sent up that it was sometimes hard to think of them as satirists; like the grave bowler-hatted businessmen in Magritte’s paintings, they had the unthreatening banality of great spies, and it allowed them access to the strangeness that lurks just below the smooth surface of the talk show and the sound bite.”
In 1973, Whitney Balliett wrote a beautiful Profile of Bob and Ray for The New Yorker. The two men met at WHDH, in Boston, where Bob was a d.j. and Ray read the news. Ad-libbing on the air, they quickly discovered that they were on the same wavelength. Balliett follows Bob and Ray into the studio, where he finds that they are consummate professionals: their show, which is almost entirely improvised, seems like it’s been planned and rehearsed in advance, and the atmosphere is relaxed and effortless. The one exception is the fake soap opera “Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife.” It’s incredibly demanding, since Bob and Ray must each improvise multiple characters, all of them interrupting and talking over one another in their own (male and female) voices. “The moment it started,” Balliett writes,
Bob and Ray seemed to draw closer at their table and a hell of intense concentration descended over them. They became extremely active; they lifted their shoulders and eyebrows, kicked their feet, and swayed back and forth in their chairs. Their in-place motions suggested the furious twitchings of dreaming dogs. They also looked at one another steadily as they slipped in and out of various voices, and when they were finished, the tension dissolved immediately in a barrage of throat-clearings.
Balliett was, among other things, The New Yorker’s jazz critic, and in Bob and Ray he saw something like the improvisational genius of jazz. Bob’s son is the comedian Chris Elliott; his granddaughter is Abby Elliott, of “Saturday Night Live.” His genius, it turns out, runs in the family.
Original Link: Looking Back at Bob and Ray
Bob and Ray Achive Org
A wonderful (and free) archive of over 200 comedy sketches.
Bob Elliott, Of Comedy Team Bob And Ray, Dies At 92
04 Feb 2016 | AP | NPR
Bob Elliott, half of the enduring television and radio comedy team Bob and Ray, has died, He was 92.
Elliott, father of actor-comedian Chris Elliott, died Tuesday at his home in Cundy’s Harbor, Maine, part of the town of Harpswell, Rick Gagne, director of the Brackett Funeral Home, said Wednesday.
The cause of death wasn’t made public.
For nearly 45 years, until the death of Elliott’s comedy partner Ray Goulding, Bob and Ray entertained millions of radio listeners and television viewers.
“He was the kindest, most gentle man I knew, and obviously the funniest. He was a true renaissance man,” Chris Elliott (Groundhog Day, David Letterman’s Late Show and Late Night) said in a statement on behalf of the family.
“I would be happy if I could be just half the man he was,” he said. “And since I’m speaking for my siblings, I know my brother – and all my sisters for that matter – would be happy if they could be half the man he was too.”
Chris Elliott’s daughters are Abby Elliott, who was a Saturday Night Live cast member for four seasons, and actress Bridey Elliott.
“RIP Bob Elliott, the great&funny man who begat Chris Elliott, who begat @elliottdotabby & @brideylee,” Jimmy Kimmel posted on his Twitter account.
Judd Apatow tweeted, “Go listen to Bob and Ray! They are the funniest. Timeless, brilliant comedy.”
Bob and Ray practiced a gentle, quirky brand of comedy that relied not on one-liners or boffo jokes but rather a deadpan delivery that relentlessly skewered pomposity and seriousness.
“I guess it’s the hilarity of pomposity; that hasn’t gone out of fashion,” Elliott said when asked to explain the enduring nature of their humor. Goulding added: “We magnify the insignificant. You know, flourishes and bands accompanying the opening of a sandwich.”
The team won a prestigious Peabody Award in 1956. “They deal primarily in satire, that rare and precious commodity,” the judges wrote. “Their aim is deadly, their level is high, and their material is fresh, original, imaginative, and terribly funny.”
Following Goulding’s death in 1990, Elliott remained active as a solo performer, appearing regularly throughout the ’90s on television and occasionally in films. He played Bob Newhart’s father on the seriesNewhart and his own son Chris’ father on Get a Life. He also appeared in the films Quick Change and Cabin Boy.
He had also worked solo occasionally during the team’s long run, appearing in the film Author Author and in a handful of TV movies.
He and his late partner were inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.
Bob and Ray’s long partnership began at Boston radio station WHDH in 1946 when Goulding, after delivering the news on Elliott’s music program, began to stick around and swap anecdotes with the host.
“When we first began, it was 90 percent ad lib,” Elliott recalled in 1992. “A good part of what we did involved two or three hours of playing records, and the records gave you time to think of what to do next.”
Listeners demanded more, however, and the station soon scheduled Matinee with Bob and Ray. It offered offbeat comments on the day’s news, fables about fictitious characters and bogus contest offers.
In a biography of Bob and Ray admirer Woody Allen, Eric Lax wrote that Elliott and Goulding “created thousands of perfectly oddball characters. … They manipulated language the way Satchel Paige manipulated baseballs.”
One elaborate joke, put on during the early days of TV, pretended to offer phony television antennas for sale to radio listeners who wanted to impress their neighbors.
“Try to be a phony in your neighborhood,” the ads proclaimed. “If you’re going to be a phony, be a good one.”
The pair made their own move to television in 1951 with the Bob and Ray show. Unlike Sid Caesar, Milton Berle and other early TV comedians, they did not attract a mass audience. But their low-key humor, once described by The New York Times as “outrageously innocuous,” was cherished by a devoted following.
Their show rarely dealt with topical matters, an exception coming during the Red-hunting days of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Then, during a soap opera parody that took place in the small town of “Skunk Hollow,” they introduced a blustering Commissioner Carstairs, who waved a list of names of supposed miscreants he threatened to expose.
The program, which also featured Cloris Leachman and Audrey Meadows as regulars, ended in 1953.
In New York City, meanwhile, Elliott and Goulding continued to thrive. They appeared on the Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen television shows and won a regular spot on NBC’s Today Show. They also appeared on Broadway in Bob and Ray, The Two and Only and released record albums and books of their comedy sketches.
Born in Boston, Elliott attended the Feagan School of Drama and Radio.
After an early first marriage to June Underwood ended in divorce, he married Lee Knight in 1954 and they had five children: Colony, Shannon, Amy, Robert Jr. and Christopher.
Bob and Ray “Most Beautiful Face Winner”
