Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob and Ray

by Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039449668X
• ISBN13: 9780394496689
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: Random Hoiuse (1975)
• Length: 177 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Two And Only

A man-on-the-street interview descends into a discussion of the many uses for cranberries. A spelling bee begins to look suspicious when one of the contestants gets words like "who" while the others get "interfenestration." Celebrity chef Mary McGoon unveils a recipe for "Frozen Ginger Ale Salad." Visiting the laboratory of the beloved Mr. Science (brought to you by the Philanthropic Council to Make Things Nicer), little Jimmy Schwab watches another fascinating experiment with the awe of a child, a very sheltered child: "A candle! Holy suffering catfish. Wait'll I tell all the kids at school I've seen one of those." Bridging the gap between the Jack Benny Show and "Saturday Night Live," Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were a comedy team who worked on radio and television from 1946 to the late 1980s, honing a unique brand of whimsy that managed to be both genial and bizarre. This 1975 book brings together about 50 top-quality Bob & Ray sketches. They looked like bank presidents, eschewed profanity and sex references, and were somewhat out of place in their own time and more so today, with their middle-of-the-road, Norman Rockwell sensibility. Yet few people in comedy don't know of Bob & Ray and speak highly of them as trailblazers in the mold of Lenny Bruce or Monty Python. Kurt Vonnegut, in his introduction to this book, notes you can't call this "the cream of the cream of their jokes," given the "amazing evenness" of their larger body of work. But you do get a thorough appreciation with this engagingly re-readable book of why Bob & Ray were so much fun. By the time of this book, the first of three such collections published during their career, Bob & Ray were adapting slowly to changing times, offering parodies of "The Waltons" and "Baretta" to go with their older, more established sketch material, like the soap opera "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife," which featured a show-biz family so inept they are seen here leaving entertainment entirely to start their own restaurant with a menu consisting entirely of toast. (Not French toast, though, that's too hard.) Like Vonnegut says, the ineptitude of the characters presented by Bob & Ray was a running theme of their comedy, and a big part of their charm, along with the fact that for all their bumbling, nothing really tragic seemed to befall anyone, apart maybe from the woman who got caught trying to snip a lock of Walter Cronkite's mustache, who gets what she deserved. "Write If You Get Work" comes complete with great Mort Drucker illustrations and an actual Newsday restaurant review of "The House Of Toast" which is as funny as any of the sketches. As for the sketches themselves, they work not only for laughs but as mind-twisting exercises into making the impossible sound hopelessly mundane. How does one make a career out of impersonating food and drink, anyway? The work of Bob & Ray has been sadly out of view since Ray's death in 1990, and a reprint of this book would gladden the hearts