Bob and Ray

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.
Radio.
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".
"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 10th-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 would announce someone at the door and take a "third" phone call, which David would accept 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". A frequent target during their early years was a musical 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, all voiced by Bob or 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.
Other radio projects.
"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 stand-by 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 timeslots, from a 15-minute series in midafternoon to their hour-long 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 wrote much of their material, their writers included Tom Koch, who scripted many of their best-known routines, and the pioneering radio humorist Raymond Knight. Bob Elliott later married Knight's widow.
Another writer was 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.
Characters and spoofs.
Characters.
Elliott and Goulding lent their voices to a variety of recurring characters and countless one-shots, creating a multilayered world that parodied the real-life world of radio broadcasting. Elliott and Goulding played "Bob" and "Ray," the hosts of an ostensibly serious radio program. Their "staff" (all voiced by Elliott and Goulding) was a comic menagerie of reporters, book reviewers, actors, and all other manner of radio personalities, all of whom interacted with "Bob" and "Ray," as well as with each other. Almost all of these characters had picturesque names, as in one sketch where Bob introduced Ray as one Maitland Q. Montmorency, who then replied, "My name is John W. Norvis. I have "terrible" handwriting."
Recurring characters played by Bob Elliott included:
Any script calling for a child's voice usually went to Elliott.
Ray Goulding's roster of characters included:
While originally employing a falsetto, Goulding generally used the same flat voice for all of his women characters, of which perhaps the best-known was Mary Margaret McGoon (satirizing home-economics expert Mary Margaret McBride), who offered bizarre recipes for such entrees as "ginger ale salad" and "mock turkey." In 1949, Goulding, as Mary, recorded "I'd Like to Be a Cow in Switzerland", which soon became a novelty hit and is still occasionally played by the likes of Dr. Demento. Later, the character was known simply as Mary McGoon. Another female character was Natalie Attired, "radio's Song Sayer" who, instead of singing songs, recited their lyrics to a drumbeat accompaniment.
Spoofs and parodies.
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," which 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."). 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. CBS's programming department frequently supplied scripts promoting CBS' 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 gave up when the crooks found him and kept beating him up.
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.
The pair also had a parody of the detective show "Mannix" called "Blimmix", a dimwitted detective who would be beaten up at the end of each of his segments by whatever thug served as the antagonist.
Commercial parodies.
Commercial parody was a popular forte with Bob and Ray. A typical show would have such "sponsors" as:
Television.
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 their typical routines, 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 the 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 that successfully captured their unique approach to humor: They 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?"
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.".
Other media.
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".
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 granddaughter Abby also joined the cast midway through season 34 in 2009, marking three generations of Elliots 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.
Elliott died on February 2, 2016.
Honors.
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.
Media.
Books.
"Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray" Copyright 1975 by Robert B. Elliott and Raymond W. Goulding Foreword Copyright 1975 by Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Elliott, Bob - Write if you get work.
1. American wit and humor. I. Goulding, Ray, Joint author. II. Title.
PN6162.E45 818'.5'407 75-10297
Manufactured in the United States of America 468975