Radio Recap: Bob and Ray

I've written more than 100 of my Radio Recaps so far yet scarcely any have been about comedy programs. To be fair, as much of an old-time radio fan that I am, I was very slow to come around to radio comedy. Even today, there's just a small handful of comedy shows that I genuinely like, a much large list of shows I mostly like (with certain quantifiers) and a nearly as large list of shows that I don't like hearing at all.

It's not simply that comedy is subjective -- all art is. But comedy is also topical; even if the comedy doesn't rely on commentary on then-current events, it tends to use slang and cultural references that are very soon minor historical footnotes.

The comedy of Bob and Ray (performed by Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding) is, I think, somewhere between of-its-time and timeless. They satirized trends in entertainment - especially satirizing radio shows of the time (such as their parody of the soap opera Mary Noble, Backstage Wife in their recurring sketches "Myra Backstage, Noble Wife" or the One Man's Family as "One Feller's Family"). But a lot of their comedy comes from two men simply having a conversation and trying to surprise or one-up each other.

I really didn't get Bob and Ray the first time I heard it. My local radio station never broadcast Bob and Ray as part of "Those Old Radio Shows," so I only heard it when I began listening to Yesterday USA in my late 'teens. The first time I heard an episode the rebroadcaster made a big deal about the series. Listening to that episode, it didn't seem like much of a big deal. It was a late 40s iteration of their program and they sounded like a couple of disc jockeys (which is how they started) bantering with each other. Their voices were so casual they were nearly mumbling - it required a lot of my attention to follow what they were saying and after that, I wasn't so sure that it was worth my time listening to more of them.

What changed my mind was John Dunning's book On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. Dunning's entry on Bob and Ray made the series sound very funny - I was especially interested in hearing some of the parodies Dunning described, such as the Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy juvenile adventure serial parody, "Jack Headstrong, the All-American American." I'd heard plenty of Jack Armstrong episodes on Yesterday USA and I'd never enjoyed it; I thought that program was ripe for parody and, indeed, it's some of Bob and Ray's best material. The opening of "Jack Headstrong" in which Bob and Ray yell "Jack Headstrong!" at each other, dragging it out so long that (to me) it becomes funnier and funnier always placed me in the right frame of mind.

Of course, around the same time I was learning to appreciate Bob and Ray, I was also getting into improv comedy, thanks to discovering Whose Line Is It Anyway? Dunning had explained that although the series had a script, Bob and Ray would frequently veer off-script. Sometimes they'd try to confuse each other, sometimes the producers in the studio would introduce a sudden noise and see if they could incorporate it into their act. It's probably not to every taste, but once I knew what Bob and Ray was about, I was in.

The series ran on basically every network under all kinds of names. Their earliest days were as Matinee with Bob and Ray (1946-1951); then they went to network radio as Bob and Ray Present the National Broadcasting Company (1951-1953); they appeared as a segment on NBC's news show Monitor (1955-1959); Bob and Ray on Mutual (1955-1957); Bob and Ray Present the CBS Radio Network (1959-1960); decades later they popped up on NPR as the Bob and Ray Public Radio Show (1983-1987).

They portrayed every voice on their show; this meant adopting all kinds of unusual accents and speaking patterns, as well as Ray's surprisingly good falsetto which he used to portray all the female characters.

Outside of radio, they were on NBC television in 1951; we have a few episodes available to us on YouTube and although it's primitive TV, they were gamely doing a lot of their improv and adapting their characters over from radio. My favourite TV sketch is the "Frankenstein Brothers Suit" sketch:

They enjoyed a big revival in the 1970s with their stage show Bob and Ray: The Two and Only, which revisited a lot of the characters from their radio show. That also lead to a few books of their routines, which are all right as a read, but their jokes are much funnier with the two men delivering them.

A lot of the comedy on Bob and Ray is, like that "Jack Headstrong" gag, based on repetition. Many of their recurring sketches were essentially the same gag each time, such as Ray's character Webley Webster, who would introduce a dramatization of some great book that, for some reason, would turn out to be a seagoing adventure program in which a captain assaults his first mate (for me, some of the humour comes from anticipating what imagined slight will cause the captain to assault the first mate).

The Old Time Radio Researchers have 429 different Bob and Ray episodes in their library.

This is Ray Goulding reminding you to write if you get work...

...and Bob Elliott reminding you to hang by your thumbs.