Bob and Ray Tonight: "Lucky Phone Call" (plus an encore presentation of "The Cranberry Man")

At the moment our host doesn't seem to be loading audio or video files. Well, this too shall pass. (I hope.) -- Ken







With the addition now of the above photo (from Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray), I thought it was worth what the Car Talk guys would call "an encore presentation" of Wally Ballou's Times Square interview of Floyd Smith, the cranberry grower, from the Original Broadway Cast album of Bob and Ray: The Two and Only. And now we proceed to tonight's new business, a Bob and Ray "Lucky Phone Call." -- Ken





FOR TONIGHT'S "LUCKY PHONE CALL," CLICK HERE





THURBER 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

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Bob and Ray Tonight: Part 2 of "Spelling Bee" -- the annual Bob and Ray Grand National Spelling Bee Contest (plus Bulletin No. 4)

Bulletin No. 4 (see Bulletin No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3)

"We are ready to go round in our second, deciding go-round in our Grand National Semifinal Spelling Bee. Our contestants are still bickering among themselves about the unfortunate fact that two of them drew hard words and one of them drew an easy word in the first round."

-- Bob, in tonight's Part 2 of "Spelling Bee"

by Ken



Last night, in Part 1 of "Spelling Bee," we witnessed the thrill-packed and controversial first round of the finals of the annual Bob and Ray Grand National Spelling Bee Contest. Contestants Betsy Ross (representing the middle Atlantic states) and Benjamin Franklin (replacing the scheduled Russell Plume representing the Southern states) seemed to feel that, even though the contestants were picking their own words blindly from the "barrel of words," third contestant Paul G. Revere (representing the Western states) was receiving unfairly favored treatment, simply because they were receiving words like "paleolithic" and "interfenestration," while Paul Revere's word was "who."



That spitfire Betsy Ross went so far as to ask, "What kind of badger game is this?" As we left last night, we were going to commercial before returning for the second and final round.





FOR PART 2 OF "SPELLING BEE," CLICK HERE





THURBER 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

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Bob and Ray Tonight: Part 1 of "Spelling Bee" -- the annual Bob and Ray Grand National Spelling Bee Contest (plus Bulletin No. 3)

Bulletin No. 3 (see Bulletin No. 1 and Bulletin No. 2)

BOB: Russell Plume, are you here?

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: Russell couldn't be here.

BOB: Well, Russell was the Southern states champion . . . Well, who are you?

FRANKLIN: I'm Benjamin Franklin from Altoona, Pennsylvania, and I'm gonna substitute for him.

-- from tonight's installment of "Spelling Bee"

Now you know that a spelling bee chez Bob and Ray isn't going to be like any other kind of spelling bee. This one gets so out of control that I've had to split it into two parts. -- Ken





FOR PART 1 OF "SPELLING BEE," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PEELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Bob and Ray Tonight: "Emergency Ward" (plus Bulletin No. 2)

Bulletin No. 2 (see Bulletin No. 1)

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 Ken



There 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 HERE





THURBER 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

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Bob and Ray Tonight: "Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy" (plus Bulletin)

"A blue moon over salmon-pink mountains [isn't] a drink, my good man. I thought you were one of our agents, so I gave you the secret greeting. You see, I'm Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy. Here's my business card."

-- Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy, in "Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy"

by Ken



Luckily I haven't kept count, so I couldn't tell you if I wanted to how many times I've reread, in whole or in part, last night's "Bob and Ray Tonight" offering, the stupendous foreword that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. provided for Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray, with such gently fond remembrance of that Bob and Ray radio broadcast he witnessed the day he was ostensibly there to talk about a writing job, mingled with the undiminished awe he felt at the wonders he witnessed; and the witness he bore to the boys' puzzling melancholy; and finally the eerily accurate appreciation of their humor, culminating in the speculation:

Man is not evil, they seem to say. He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive.



And this I believe.

"Too hilariously stupid" indeed!



As for Kurt's description of Bob and Ray's characters as "almost always fourth-rate or below, engaged in enterprises which, if not contemptible, are at least insane," people who "threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity," well, meet Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy.





FOR THE FINE POINTS OF SPYCRAFT

BOB AND RAY-STYLE, CLICK HERE





THURBER 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

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Bob and Ray Tonight: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. remembers being interviewed for a job by the fellows

[Bob and Ray's jokes] feature Americans who are almost always fourth-rate or below, engaged in enterprises which, if not contemptible, are at least insane.



And while other comedians show us persons tormented by bad luck and enemies and so on, Bob and Ray's characters threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity. There is a refreshing and beautiful innocence in Bob's and Ray's humor.



Man is not evil, they seem to say. He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive.



And this I believe.

-- from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Foreword to

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

by Ken



In most anybody else's book, this line on the copyright page might be the funniest thing in it, attributing copyright to a pair of dubious characters name of "Robert B. Elliott" and "Raymond W. Goulding." Coupla bankster exec types? FBI agents, maybe? (No, but they probably played them at some point on radio or TV.) This isn't anybody else's book, though, it's Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray (Random House, 1975).



And the book came rigged out with a foreword by one of the few people on the planet who might fairly be described as "Bob and Ray-worthy," the great Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Could there be a better way to kick off this siege of "Bob and Ray Tonight"? (Note: For a listing of previous "Bob and Ray Tonight" offerings, check out the series index.)





FOR KURT VONNEGUT JR.'S FOREWORD, CLICK HERE





THURBER 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

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