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Name: Write if you get work

Full name: Write if you get work: The best of Bob and Ray

Authors: Bob Elliott, Ray Goulding
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ISBNs:
9780394496689
039449668X

After reading David Pollock's biography of Bob and Ray, I had to pick this collection of their humor off the shelf and reread it. It's really impossible for me to review it with any objectivity. This was my introduction to Bob and Ray - as a high school student (many years ago), I found this book on my mom's bookshelf. I had no idea who these people were, but I thought it was hilarious.At the time, I had neither heard nor seen Bob and Ray, so I had no idea what they sounded like. Now I have listened to Bob and Ray for about 25 years and tracked down as many recordings of the pair that I can find, including most of the routines included here. When I read these pieces now, I hear the voices and inflections in my head.But either way, almost everything here is great comedy. Here's an example, from Kurt Vonnegut's introduction, rather than from a routine included in the book. Vonnegut was in the studio with B & R to talk about a job as writer for the pair. (He didn't get the job.) Vonnegut recounts a commercial touting advertising space on the Bob and Ray Satellite, which was to be orbited only twenty-eight feet off the ground.And I've always loved the names of B & R's characters. One "call-in show," included here, features both Illegal Left Turn Bronson and Ethel Merman Strunk, who was male. A clerk at the drivers' license bureau changed Mr. Bronson's name when she accidentally typed his traffic violation where his first name should have been. And Mr. Strunk's parents had only heard Ethel Merman on the radio, and assumed that she was a man. As Bob responded, "I guess that's possible, especially if nobody rushed over to turn down the volume in time."