DOCTOR GERHART SNUTTON (HANDSOME YOUNG PHYSICIAN): Carrying the burden of mankind's survival is serious business, Nurse Rudehouse. But I think I've made a major breakthrough. Yesterday, I injected germs of the common cold into sixteen charity patients. And would you believe that every one of them is sneezing and sniffling today?
NURSE RUDEHOUSE (HIS ASSISTANT): Well, yes, I'd believe it. In fact, I don't see anything very thrilling or surprising about it at all.
SNUTTON: Nurse Rudehouse, if you want thrills and surprises, go to Disneyland. Medical science offers nothing but hard work.
-- from "Emergency Ward"
by KenThere are a number of pieces in
Write If You Get Work where the printed version gives no indication as to who -- i.e., Bob or Ray -- takes which part(s). This used to frustrate me, but now I find it a plus, because it makes it possible to imagine each part done by both. This might at first seem to change the piece dramatically, but actually playing multiple versions in my head, I realize it really doesn't. Oh, you would get differences of emphasis and momentary effect, but I'll bet the overall result would have changed surprisingly little.
In "Emergency Ward," for example, the female part of Nurse Rudehouse naturally suggests to me Ray, which would leave handsome young physician Doctor Gerhart Snutton to Bob, and it's certainly not hard at all to hear the piece that way. But it occurs to me that it's also not hard to hear the roles reversed. And since the man with the unfortunate facial misalignment would have been done by whoever did Nurse Rudehouse, that role too would be flipflopped, to intriguing effect. It would be different, yes, but at the same time remarkably undifferent.
Which raises the interesting question of the writing process. I imagine that generally when the fellows were writing they had a clear idea of who would do which voices, but there were other times when they didn't, and perhaps more times when in the course of writing and preparing a daily radio show they changed their minds in the face of all the rigors of getting the show produced. It seems likely that a fair number of such decisions were made, and changed, on the fly.
TO SAMPLE LIFE IN THE BOB AND RAY
"EMERGENCY WARD," CLICK HERETHURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date#
