Text:

Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding, foreword by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Write if you get work, The Best of Bob & Ray, Random House: New York, 1975

Audio:

Bob & Ray: The Soap Operas, 4 Volumes, Classic Bob & Ray, 4 Volumes, The Best of Bob & Ray, 4 Volumes, Vintage Bob & Ray, 2 Volumes, The Radio Foundation (RADIOART): PO Box 2000 GPO, New York, NY 10116-2000

Neil Schmitz

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I begin with a testimonial. I owe my tough trim body, my radiant health, to Bob & Ray. Pop in a cassette from Larry Josephson's wonderful RadioArt collection as you begin your morning exercise. Pump iron. Do your hundred situps. Robert Brackett Elliott and Raymond Walter Goulding, radio artists, in their easeful funny way, entertain you. Time flies. You forget you are exercising. They are so droll, so preposterous. The inflatus of humor helps you stretch muscles and joints. Each side of the cassette is exactly a half hour in its play. When you get up in the morning, you don't think, groaning, of the exercise you must do. You think, brightly, of listening to some Bob & Ray. You exercise in order to listen to Bob & Ray.

Bob Elliott, born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1923, is still with us. Ray Goulding, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, is gone. Bob & Ray, the radio performance, extends from 1946, their first show on WHDH in Boston, "Matinee with Bob and Ray," to 1986, their final show on NPR, "The Bob and Ray Public Radio Show." It is one of the great oeuvres in American humorous literature. George Herriman's cartoon strip, Krazy Kat, had similar duration and sustained excellence. Herriman did a single gag, Ignatz hurling a brick at Krazy, for almost thirty years, 1912-1941. The brick was immense in its meaning. Herriman got from it a brilliant humorous poetry: Krazy's mewling babytalk, Ignatz's ratty jive, Herriman's own Joycean captions. The cartoon took place in Coconino County, Arizona, Grand Canyon country, and its desert perspectives, its odd mesas, its desert skies, were surreally drawn. In Krazy Kat, Spanish is almost a second language. In Krazy Kat interspecies love is always offered, always rejected. Bob & Ray, the performance, is just as deep, just as long, in its ingenuity, its characterization, its single endlessly productive gag.

A literary retrospective is in order. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has in fact begun the evaluation. His essay, "Bob and Ray, An Appreciation," written for the catalog of The Museum of Broadcasting exhibit, "The Bob & Ray Retrospective, June 15--July 10, 1982," raises several important issues I want to explore in this essay, one of them being the substantiality of their humor, its capacity, its competence. What humor carries, what humor does, is, of course, always a serious question in Vonnegut's fiction. Think of what is loaded into the phrase, "so it goes," in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the title-page of which describes the author as a "fourth-generation German-American now living In easy circumstances on Cape Cod [and smoking too much], who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, 'The Florence of the Elbe,' a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale."
There is a craft kinship, Vonnegut, Bob Elliott, Ray Goulding. He takes them into the phrasing of his humor.
"What was inherently comical about radio is comical about television today: the necessity of seeming well worth paying attention to, even when less than nothing was going on. Bob and Ray, both serious radio announcers at one time, one day discovered that they could be comedians by intentionally trying and failing to be wonderful when less than nothing was going on. / Their jokes turn out to be universal, although deeply rooted in old-time radio, because so much of life presents itself as the same dilemma: how to seem lusty and purposeful when less than nothing is going on."

How do Bob & Ray universalize, escape the tyranny of the referent, the discourse of a particular radio show, its characters, its action, its distinctive voicing? In order to relish Bob & Ray's "One Feller's Family," to get it, to see the logic of its routine, must we have a close knowledge of "One Man's Family," the popular radio soap opera of the Thirties and Forties? The Barbours of "One Man's Family," exemplars of familial felicity, are the dyspeptic Butchers of "One Feller's Family." What "One Feller's Family" gets, as we shall see, is, in the first case, the ritualistic repetition of the format: musical introduction, announcer statement, sign-off. "Fanucci," Ray intones, "with or without nuts, the greatest name in fudge," is the sponsor. Episodes are from a Book, a chapter, a page, sometimes also the bottom of a page, in imitation of the Book and chapter device on "One Man's Family." The sign-off (Bob & Ray are masters of radio sign-offs) is incantatory, like the end of a sung prayer: "'One Feller's Family' is written and produced by T. Wilson Messy. This is a Messy production."

Since "One Man's Family" is memorable only to specialists and collectors, "One Feller's Family," in its humorous reference, would seem particularly imperiled. Again, Vonnegut:

When television came along, it suddenly mattered what Bob and Ray looked like. Movie actors had faced a similar crisis when sound was added to film. Suddenly it mattered terribly what their voices were like. And here was a wonderful stroke of luck: Bob and Ray, who could have looked like anything, looked as wistfully funny as they sounded, and secretly wise. Moreover, they seemed as unlikely a pair of pals as Laurel and Hardy. Ray was the big bluffer, Bob was the smaller, more intellectual, more pessimistic, more easily disappointed one. / That was what they looked like. It was an illusion as far as their actual personalities were concerned, but how fruitful that illusion has been!

Ray Goulding was also the cross-gender cross-voiced character, the one who did female impersonation: purring breathy sexy Mary Backstayge, fruity cranky old bat Mary McGoon. In defiant strong falsetto Mary McGoon lustily sang pop tunes. "Mule Train" is arguably her best cover. Aunties, housewives, girlfriends, Ray Goulding did them in his distinctive falsetto. Seeing Bob & Ray as embodied persons was a surprise. You might have thought of Bob Elliott as some elongated beanpole Yankee, longnosed, emaciated, of Ray Goulding as short and round, more potbellied than beefy, an old-time salesman sort of guy. It was hard to locate the femme in big beefy Ray Goulding, but it was there, and he had perfect pitch. Seeing them, just two ordinary midcentury American guys, thinking of their diverse numerous characters, one remarked, as Vonnegut did, the brilliance of their radio humor. On television, in person, small and big, Bob & Ray went on imperturbably doing their radio humor. Like Vonnegut they worked on junk phrases: "going like sixty," "not now, there isn't time," "why, you . . ." loading them with wry metalinguistic significance. Like Vonnegut they did fools, interviewed them, recorded their straightforward self-important foolishness, the innocence of their poignant on air awkwardness ("Is this on?") Radio newsmen are also sonorous fools. Bob Elliott's unflappable Wally Ballou, always coming on air syllables late: ". . . allou here," never masters his microphone. Bob & Ray's principal mode is the radio interview, which is perforce the interrogation of an expert, if only a witness, an interrogation of experience and knowledge. How do we read Bob & Ray as text? The medium of the performance is sound, radio programming, for the ear and the ear's mind only. Bob & Ray refer to a radio programming that is increasingly fugitive, merely archival. Write if you get work, The Best of Bob and Ray (1975) in fact does not include the best of Bob and Ray, can't textualize the full quality of their humor, which is in their radio voicing, some classical routines critically turning on the play of a certain sound effect. Doors closing, staircase stepping, are intrinsic to "Matt Neffer, Boy Spotwelder," certainly one of Bob & Ray's best pieces, and not in Write if you get work. My reference is exclusively to the broadcast material on cassettes, to actual performance. Josephson's collection is not complete, yet the available sample arguably presents, in its long duration, the 'text' of Bob & Ray's performance, the radio world, the radio sound, it creates. How do we read it? Where do we put it in American humorous literature? Near Vonnegut, obviously. Near Garrison Keillor, whose radio show, "The Prairie Home Companion," differently spoofs and parodies classic radio programming. Near "The Firesign Theater (Philip Proctor, David Ossman, Philip Austin, Peter Bergman) of the Sixties and Seventies, jazzy radio artists parodying radio shows, beloved by dopers and trippers.

There is first the issue of the conjunction, of the show's name, of the conjunction itself. As Bob Elliott remembered it in a September 24, 1973 New Yorker profile: "The station [WHDH] got the rights to broadcast the Braves and Red Sox games, and they asked us to do a twenty-five-minute show before each game. It was called 'Matinee with Bob and Ray.' They had to have that rhyme, and it's the only reason we're Bob and Ray and not Ray and Bob." Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, Vonnegut reminds us, do "Bob and Ray," or "Bob & Ray." It is their single ongoing text. Bob & Ray is the performance, Bob and Ray the players, Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding radio artists. Bob and Ray occasionally acknowledge Robert Brackett Elliott and Raymond Walter Goulding, usually through a radio character who mentions their full name. Webley Webster, the show's feature writer and book reviewer, publishes a scandalous biography of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding that is, Bob and Ray protest, all wrong. Ray Goulding does not wear a hairpiece, Ray points out. Characters appearing on the show (either Bob or Ray doing them) often confuse Bob and Ray, are always quietly corrected by either Bob or Ray. The McBeeBee twins, band leaders, musicians, are simultaneous speakers, one brother a syllable behind, are almost doubled opposites, the horror of Bob and Ray's miraculous symbiosis. Two brothers trapped inside a single mental wavelength, a single speech, they manifest the horror of such twinning, all that humorously displaced. Bob & Ray best names the performance, best titles its discourse. It is how Josephson lists the work in his archive. The ampersand gets the quickness of the exchange, gets the singularity of the act.

In the famous sign-off, so taut with meaning, with spooky significance, there is a fade, characters into humorists: "This is Ray Goulding reminding you to write if you get work." "And Bob Elliot reminding you to hang by your thumbs." Jolly nihilism, this ending, and richly historicized, too. Ray Goulding's reminder is of the Thirties (his childhood and youth), of the Depression, of unemployment and separation, of life conditional, contingent. Bob Elliott's reminder is Sartrean, of the existentialist Forties, commands us to be conscious of our existence, to know how we stand in life. The sign-off is also a parody of radio sign-off, of its desire to be distinctive and iterable. In the exit lines Ray Goulding resumes his seniority, his precedence.
The Bob & Ray Show, in all its diversity, plays at being a radio network, one that stretches, in Bob & Ray promotional language, "approximately from coast to coast." Listen to Bob & Ray for everything: feature programs, news, weather, sports. There is a core cast: Bob and Ray, announcers, hosts; Bob's Wally Ballou and Ray's Artie Schemerhorn, ace reporters; Ray's Mary McGoon and Aunt Penny, who do cuisine and housekeeping shows, who also do the books and some production; Ray's moronic Webley Webster, who does book reviews; Bob's Biff Burns and Ray's Steve Bosco, sports. People in western New York always enjoyed the farm news phoned in by Ray's Dean Archer Armstead from the Lackawanna Field Station, happily knowing there are no farms in Lackawanna, just steel mills or the rusting ruins of such. Dean was often to the spit can as he nasally mumbled his report. All these diverse characters, and the show's multitude of daft interviewed persons, loony guests, fraudulent experts, angry contestants, were, of course, always just Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding doing voices, doing impersonations and anti-impersonations, at play with sound effects, the pure poets of doors closing and staircase stepping. Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding parody radio programming, particularly the radio of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, the radio of midcentury America.

It is a body of work, that radio, much of it paradigmatic, its forms elemental, constant, what we see on television. Soap operas, quiz shows, detective shows, children's shows, food shows, entertainment news, local color stories, information shows, interview shows, all these programs, first on radio, get really their first comprehensive critical reading through Bob & Ray's parody, its enlargement, its extension. No student of "The Arthur Godfrey Show" would want to overlook Bob Elliot's Arthur Sturdley. Bob & Ray parody the form, personnel, and language of such shows. They isolate certain phrases, certain cliches, in radio language, turn them into key phrases, surrealize them. It is the single act of their performance. Keillor's "The Prairie Home Companion" often is "The Prairie Home Companion," an Upper Midwestern Grand Ole Opry. No real banjoists, no real Celtic keeners, ever perform on the Bob & Ray Show. The Real of classical radio programming, news/weather/sports/features, has no entry into the Bob & Ray Show, which nonetheless claims the sanity and reassurance of that radio programming, its vigilance, its supervision, its voice speaking in emergency and crisis, its entertainment, its commercials, claims all its prerogatives, its importance. Wally Ballou, his traffic airplane crashed in Long Island Sound, calmly reports the onslaught of drowning water, is cut off. Back in the studio, Bob and Ray, cool as cucumbers, promptly turn to the next segment of their show. The Real has no entry into the Bob & Ray Show, which exists on the single wavelength Bob and Ray share, its two persons, its question and answer.

Bob & Ray, as performance, is bound to an original performance, to a familiar radio program, bound to its ephemeral historicity, such as it is. To get the Butchers, you should know the Barbours. To appreciate Bob Elliott's jovially vile Arthur Sturdley, you should have a fairly developed critical judgment of Arthur Godfrey, himself a radio artist of considerable parts and power in the Fifties, a voice stylist, adenoidally resonant, slow and precise in articulation, playing a signature laugh, one slow in sequence, at once genial and obscurely threatening. Well, those specific shows, those special performers, do figure in the Bob & Ray Show. If you have a mastery of midcentury classical radio programming, you are its best listener/reader. Yet the Bob & Ray Show escapes the primordial limitation of parody, achieves its own integrity, an autonomous existence, is itself, singular in its standing. Arthur Sturdley is funny just as he is, typical, the beloved radio personality who is also a monster, a capricious tyrant. Godfrey would often act out on air his petulant cruelty, famously firing, on air, an unsuspecting singer, Julius La Rosa. There is a truth in the real Arthur Godfrey's constructed laughter, something sinister, which Bob Elliott beautifully enlarges in his impersonation. The humor of the impersonation rests finally in the laugh itself, is a study of the laugh, an exposure of the laugh.

The Real of classical radio programming (actual news, factual information) has no entry into the Bob & Ray Show. Even commercials for real companies (General Electric, General Motors, Alcoa, Nationwide Insurance, Glidden Paint, Piels Beer) are transformed, are never about the product, as such, but about Bob & Ray, are nothing but Bob & Ray routines. What General Electric gets is a Ray Goulding interview of Kent Lyle Birdley, oldtime radio announcer, who has been chosen as a GE spokesman. All that gets discussed in the commercial is Kent Lyle Birdley's disastrous career, his failure and disappearance in the business. The GE job is his comeback. The Nationwide Insurance commercial begins: "And now . . . we'd like to talk about insurance." Door slams, sound of many feet running away. Bob & Ray inclose this Real, this radio referent, capture it, install humorous truths in its parodied language. No one is gifted, no one is talented, no one is doing well, on the Bob & Ray Show. No one is happy. The Show constantly subverts the assurance and authority of radio rationality. Wally Ballou, "multiple award-winning" radio reporter, regularly confuses assignments and topics. He often doesn't listen to the answer, his questions increasingly irrelevant. Obtuse, Wally Ballou is the pure insistence of the question (who are you? What do you do?), the question that isn't really interested in the answer, that is just the question. Ray Goulding's Steve Bosco, who does sports for the Bob & Ray Show, has a certain hearty alcoholic brio, is always appealing for money, for advances. Misery, mediocrity, failure, this is what Bob & Ray interrogate. People are angry on the Bob & Ray Show. Staff members are angry. Webley Webster deeply resents that his musical theme sets him up as a moron. The music is always bad. Bands can't get past chords. Clarinets squeak and waver.

The Bob & Ray Show, in its early production, often had a certain informality, played with the illusion of spontaneity, the risk of improvisation, was 'live,' as it were, without a script. It did audience interviews, found eccentrics, crackpots, the demented in great number, people who didn't make it into Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust. It resolutely questioned them ("And your name, sir?"), skeptically suffering their nutty responses ("Shirley Temple," says a deep bass voice). Ray's Shirley Temple has an attitude, angrily bristling when Bob asks him about the problem of his name. For all the ill humor of its denizen speakers, the Bob & Ray Show is nonetheless always gentle with any parodied program's desire, always inside a humorous economy. It is never for an instant serious. It is always doing a kind of radio program, a Mr. Science, an Aunt Penny in her Sunlit Kitchen, a Public Service Announcement, always inside a certain radio program discourse. Yet it often often arrives elsewhere, using excerpted or highlighted phrases from such programming to present different situations, giving such phrases new singular significance. On "One Feller's Family," Ray's Fanny Butcher is a crabby old woman who can barely tolerate the vague oblivious Father Butcher. Her hatred is palpable, her long silences following one of Father Butcher's idiot utterances long, long, long. Bob's blithering Father Butcher is a compulsive rosebush trimmer. As the Butchers natter and whine over the smallest of household tasks, burglars are noisily upstairs, the garage is in flames, fire trucks, sirens blowing, are roaring up, sad persons are drowning just beyond the breakwater ("I'm going down for the third time, Mam"). The Barbours of "One Man's Family" are all outgoing parental love and generosity, their voices mellow and creamy. The Butchers are self-absorbed, in terminal grudge phases. There is no love at all in these shriveled beings. Fanny Butcher is sharper, quicker, than Father Butcher, is always asking him barbed questions. Father Butcher's singleminded somewhat deaf nuttiness is a wicked defense. "Fanny, Fanny, Fanny," he'll say, and it is always the clincher. In these exchanges, always brief, Bob and Ray perfectly deliver a certain octogenarian weariness, perfectly register the subtractions of old age, its fixations, the lunatic importance of little things. The Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, radical feminism, Stonewall Nation, had no entry into the Bob & Ray Show, which scrupulously did not treat sexual, racial, or gender topics, as such. On the one occasion it was political, it was also, in its weird Bob & Ray way, apolitical. In 1954, on WINS, New York, using the device of its long-established parodied soap opera, "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife," Bob & Ray took on the McCarthy/Army hearings, Ray doing a superlative Senator Joseph R. McCarthy impersonation. It was the major thing, a palpable hit. Ray had exactly McCarthy's voice, the register, the tone, and he got the threat and latent hysteria in McCarthy's hectoring voice, got it all in McCarthy's excited stammer, which Ray played like a saxophone. But what was the action? Commissioner Carstairs wasn't really wrong. In obvious violation of zoning regulations, Harry Backstayge had actually constructed a sixteen story skyscraper house in residential Skunk Haven. The Commissioner, for all his odious speech manner, is on to something. Bob's urbane "Handsome Harry Backstayge" has, in these episodes, something of the 'guilty' Alger Hiss's anxiously bland manner. Bob & Ray's radio parody never sharpens into satire, never becomes partisan. Major American corporations were delighted with Bob & Ray's humorous commercials, tolerated the daffy displacement of their product, did not mind that comic commercials were a subgenre in the Bob & Ray text. In the Sixties and Seventies, Philip Proctor, David Ossman, Philip Austin and Peter Bergman, radio artists, the Firesign Theater, principally did their radio comedy on vinyl, cut records of studio performances. "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers" (1970) and "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" (1975) are exemplary. The jacket of "Don't Crush The Dwarf" has this warning: "You might not want to play this record on radio because of the F-CC." "In The Next World" is dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges and Raymond Chandler. Firesign Theater does a speedy Californian radio performance, an absurdist parody of radio programming. "Don't Crush That Dwarf" begins with the format and language of religious broadcasting, then moves from station to station, is a parodic tour up and down the dial of contemporary Californian radio. On one station, combat in Vietnam; on another, drug sales. Questions reverberate: "What is reality?" "Is it going to be all right?" "What Are We Going To Do, Man?" These questions never occur to Wally Ballou. He does not ask them. Firesign Theater works parodically in and upon radio format and language just as Bob & Ray do, similarly using sound effects, doing mike play, but in different economies of meaning.

In its comedy and humor, Firesign Theater carries specific historical loads, proposes a countercultural subversion, opens classical radio programming to surrealist captures, to mind-bending trippy narratives. No such history presses in on the Bob & Ray Show, yet it has its loads, as we have seen, its humorous presentations of misery, mediocrity, failure, in radio language, in radio formats. Sometimes the awful presses dangerously in a Bob & Ray routine. Inside the silliness of the narration, a tension builds. In 1959, on CBS, Bob & Ray did an extended radio broadcast of a Bob & Ray staff picnic. It is, I think, one of their great pieces. As Larry Josephson divides his RadioArt Bob & Ray archive, there is Classic, Vintage, and the Best of Bob & Ray. Great is also a possible category. "Just Fancy Dan, Barber of Hartsdale," collected in the Classic series, is a great Bob & Ray piece, one where the awful dangerously presses. Bob's Just Fancy Dan has Ray's Pliny in his chair. They speak in slow rural voices. Just Fancy Dan is doing Pliny's sideburns. "We're all mighty grateful for what you've done," says Pliny. "We appreciate it. We're all mighty grateful." "Helped you over that tough spot," says Fancy Dan, "so I suppose the wife is grateful and the kids are grateful." "The wife is grateful and the kids are grateful," says Pliny. "We're all mighty grateful." It goes on, Pliny oozing gratitude, Just Fancy Dan encouraging the protestation. Suddenly Pliny gives a little groan. Just Fancy Dan has nicked him. "It's kind of flowing there," Just Fancy Dan observes. Pliny has to lie down on the floor. "I've had a full and happy life," he says. "Anything you want to say?" Just Fancy Dan wants to know. "We're grateful," says Pliny, "we're all mighty grateful." Some dire insidious thing is in this piece, inside the slow rural voices, inside Pliny's earnest gratitude, inside Just Fancy Dan's insistence ("I suppose the wife is grateful and the kids are grateful"), and it just stays there, is humorously contained by the constant of Bob and Ray's imperturbably flat voices.

It is the ratio of load to capacity, of misery to human expression, that enables us to distinguish among humorists. Ray's Barry Campbell, a doomed actor, reports one theatrical humiliation after the other, flop after flop, but is always present in the interview speaking in his easeful actorish baritone, in a suave professional voice. This is a major device in Bob & Ray's radio humor, the flat formal radio voice, in conventional radio language, in radio rationality, reporting lunacies, reporting desperation and despair, reporting misery. It is the triumph of their performance, its absolute dialogical control of multifarious polyphonic reality, just two radio announcers doing a contentious bickering staff, a restive studio audience, doing the expert, the person in the news, the interview subject. Somber Barry Campbell always fails, must report his bad reviews. In "Grand Motel," Leonard Humphrey, its "uncompromising owner," always loses his guests because he adheres to rigid rules concerned cut-off times for serving the continental breakfast. As it happens, this is a contentious issue for every guest who shows up at Grand Motel. In rationalizing radio language, announcer voices speaking, life as a bad dream repeats itself, doomed insistence, obstinate others. It is a situation, a circumstance, that humorously foregrounds the second labor of language, rationalizing, normalizing, showing us by humorous extension what is and what is said.

"Bob & Ray Staff Picnic," reported by Wally Ballou and Artie Schermerhorn, is very much about this rift, this tension, between rhetoric and reality, between desire and reality, so often, murkily, the Bob & Ray subject. "Staff Picnic" turns the subject of rift, of tension, in upon the Show itself, poses Bob & Ray as a corporate organization, poses staff as a resentful workforce, poses Bob and Ray as remote uncaring CEOs. Throughout the piece Bob and Ray are behind the tinted glass of their parked limousine, do not appear, do not speak. "It's a beautiful day here at Pine Grove State Park in Smoland, New York," says Wally Ballou introducing his report. It is in fact, we soon learn, 102, very humid. Mosquitoes are humming. Professional radio cheer, its hyped speech, resolutely meets the contingencies. "Over to you, Artie." The staff picnic is being broadcast so of course everyone must have a good time, be festive. They aren't off-show on their picnic. Their picnic is the show. Wally Ballou and Artie Schermerhorn do a cheesy commercial. One staff member is heard complaining about the commercial. He's not happy with the concept, doing commercials at the picnic. Wally Ballou and Artie Schermerhorn check out the clamor of an adjoining hog-calling contest. They interview staff members. "Over to you, Wally." Tension, frustration, unhappiness, you hear it in the voices, and all the while mosquitoes are humming. Bob and Ray arrive in an air-conditioned limousine. The staff dutifully cheers them. You hear Webley Webster gamely saying: "Hip, hip." You hear Steve Bosco gamely cheering: "Hurrah for Bob and Ray." Bob and Ray remain inside their air-conditioned limousine. At one point it suddenly starts up, drives right through a staff baseball game out to centerfield, parks under the shade of a tree. The game is over. There is an entertainment: the Cabot Brothers, Flamenco dancers, Cyril Gore, a flautist, Tex Blaisdell and his Dogs. This show within the show is a radio black hole--cacophony, chaos. Only one Cabot Brother is able to perform. You hear frantic random tapdancing, then a crash to the floor. Cyril Gore's musical performance is booed from the stage. Ray's Jacobus Pike, a Bob & Ray magnate, a senior manager in the Bob & Ray organization, reads Bob & Ray's speech, which is all conventional blather. "We hope you're having a crackerjack time," Jacobus Pike reads. But the crowd is angrily restive, many voices speaking, one voice rising to shout: "Bob and Ray are a bunch of cheapskates!" The speech is booed. Wally Ballou and Artie Schermerhorn hasten to get Tex Blaisdell and his dog act up on stage. The whole structure of the staff picnic is tottering, threatening the control and the rationality of the broadcast. Here, then, is Tex Blaisdell, but all you hear are snarling, growling, yapping dogs. The dogs attack staff members. Artie Schemerhorn is reporting, but the cacophony, the chaos, is too loud, too general, almost unbearable, sheer radio noise. Then, abruptly, a crack of thunder, a torrent of rain. Bob and Ray immediately drive off in their limousine, Wally Ballou steadfastly reporting: "The chauffeur started the motor almost simultaneously with the first clap of thunder." Mary McGoon is very resentful. Everyone is grousing. You hear the rain pouring. You hear Webley Webster sneeze. It gets worse. The bus driver has lost his keys. Wally Ballou asks someone if that snake is a water mocassin.

Here it is, then, the radio rhetoric, Wally Ballou's neutral 'objective' radio voice, and what you hear, what you understand, also broadcast. This is differently figured in other routines. Wally Ballou reports a plane crash (you hear the roaring sound, the pilot's desperate voice) as if he weren't himself on the plane. Radio always has the documentary position, is objective, neutral, a recording apparatus. The Bob & Ray Show hugely exploits this radio factor, this radio power, is constantly at humorous play with it. "Staff Picnic" begins with Wally Ballou's "It's a beautiful day in Pine Grove State Park" and someone else, a Ray character, making this announcement: "Don't touch the egg salad." To the very end Wally Ballou and Artie Schermerhorn convert the actual staff picnic, the miserable day, the mean selfishness of Bob and Ray, into radio narration, into radio discourse. The awfulness is large at the end of "Staff Picnic." Drenched, shivering, staff is huddled under a tarpaulin. No transportation. The state park is remote. The broadcast is another thing, something separate from this experience. Wally Ballou and Artie Schermerhorn are worried about rain striking the microphone, about technical difficulties. They report the misery and the anger of the abandoned staff as if they were, by radio magic, exempt, not also abandoned staff members. Radio decorum, radio rationality, finally always rules on the Bob & Ray Show.

Bob and Ray are not there to do the sign-off, to bring proper closure to the episode, so Wally Ballou and Artie Schemerhorn stand in for them, speak for them: "This is Artie Schermerhorn for Ray Goulding reminding you to write if you get work." "This is Wally Ballou for Bob Elliot reminding you to hang by your thumbs." This time, however, we feel the actual absence of Bob and Ray. We know how cruel and conceited they are. We know why they aren't here. Their sign-off, loyally and professionally done by Wally Ballou and Artie Schermerhorn, has now a certain ruthless ring to it.

n a 1973 New Yorker interview with Whitney Balliett, Bob Elliott cited Raymond Knight, a radio humorist of the Thirties, as a major influence. Bob & Ray's local fools were the sort who turned up on Knight's several rustic shows, especially one called "The KUKU Hour," which featured Knight's character, Ambrose J. Weems, who owned an imaginary radio station. Weems had a woman sidekick (Adelina Thomason) named Mrs. Pennyfeather." There is a lot of Mrs. Pennyfeather in Ray Goulding's femme impersonations. A part of her is ongoing in Ray's Aunt Penny. "We never did jokes," Bob Elliott told William Grimes in The New York Times (May 7, 1992). "It was all characterization. And we never ran with other comics. My son Chris said he was 12 years old before he knew what I did for a living." It is a line drawn in this retrospective. The Bob & Ray Show does radio humor. Jokes are poorly told on the Bob & Ray Show, fall flat. For the most part, folks are deadly serious on the Bob & Ray Show.

Chris Elliott's 1990 Fox-TV sitcom, Get A Life, dealt with a neurotic immature only son who can't leave home, who is still delivering newspapers for a living. Bob Elliott plays Chris's exasperated father in the sitcom. What was wrong with Cabin Boy (1994), Chris Elliott's breakout Hollywood film, which also featured Bob Elliott as the father? The film wanted to be an outrageous queer comedy, and couldn't do it. Instead it remained implausibly straight, true to the innocence of Bob & Ray's radio humor. Written and directed by Adam Resnick, produced by Tim Burton, Cabin Boy loosely parodied Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous (1937). In that film Freddie Bartholomew's spoiled rich brat is picked up at sea by a Portugese fishing boat, befriended by Spencer Tracy's rough sailor, taken into the nautical fraternity, and wonderfully changed, becoming a good resourceful lad. A dour David Letterman appears at the start of Cabin Boy, scowls at the pretty blond-curled mincing Chris Elliott, snarls: "Man, oh man, do I hate them fancy lads." It is the only instance in the film where sexual menace occurs, where something awful, a load, dangerously impends. The ship in Cabin Boy effectively sails without a load. Cabin Boy doesn't get a life. A lot of Bob & Ray lingers in Chris Elliott's comedic work, structures, setups, material. Bob & Ray regularly did pirate sagas, talked the talk of salty tars and furious cap'ns.

In their final performance on NPR, "The Bob & Ray Public Radio Show," Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were often perfunctory and very repetitive. They did only flypaper and steel ingot commercials, did only one parodied soap opera, "Garish Summit," a poor parody itself repetitive, predictable, without happy surprise. One listens impatiently to these cassettes, wanting classic Bob & Ray, or vintage Bob & Ray, or the best Bob & Ray, wanting their inspired daffy turns, wanting some transcended parody, and it never quite happens. The fundamental oeuvre is created in the Fifties and Sixties. It is at once a virtuoso humorous performance, a rich and extensive outlay of material, of routines and numbers, and a deep reading of classical radio programming, a poetic appropriation of its language, of its rhetoric. Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were at first simply radio announcers in the radio business. Then they discovered how to do radio announcers, and with that slip, that shift, from straight radio, became Bob & Ray, free agents, artists, rummaging in its forms and modes, doing its programs, free, free at last, in the radio business.