House of Elliotts
Monday at 6 pm, I’ll be at The Paley Center for Media (the renamed Museum of Television and Radio) in NYC for a seminar/tribute to Bob and Ray (and Chris) hosted by Keith Olbermann and featuring a distinguished panel of Elliotts (Bob and Chris, whose novel The Shroud of the Thwacker is highly recommended).
In a recent NPR telephone interview, Bob’s voice sounds hardly different from the one we all grew up with.
I had the extremely good fortune to work with Bob and Ray on an industrial video taped at the old 
reception room was an open archway, beyond which was a wall jutting out perpendicularly which neatly bisected what had once been a single office. On the right side of the wall sat Bob, on the left side sat Ray, who could not see each other but could easily hear each other when speaking in a normal tone of voice. As the visitor, you saw both Bob and Ray; both Bob and Ray only saw you.
Butter 'em on the far side and write if you get work.
Labels: Bob and Ray
posted by Don at
2:38 AM
3 Comments:
The greatest comics of the 20th century, those two. I find the Forties and Fifties amazing in the way that their pop culture allowed for genuine, actual irony--that's likely why comedy of the period ran the gamut from pies in the face and drunk humor to the most subtle and searing satire. I say this as a baby Baby Boomer (pushing 51) looking back on a period I can barely imagine. The death of satire (in pop culture) is a complicated matter--when Bob and Ray were doing their best stuff, they could refer to the ordinary and everyday in a straightforward, even respectful way. Once pop culture became anti-vernacular (thanks, Sixties), gone was any platform for addressing ordinary, everyday life from an ordinary, everyday perspective. Irony has to operate from a neutral platform, and that platform is gone once comedy becomes primarily attitude and insult.
The art of Bob and Ray has been replaced with whatever we have today. I miss them, and I wasn't even there for their best stuff.
By
Lee Hartsfeld, At
April 7, 2008 at 9:04 AM
I forgot to add...
Bob and Ray in their office at the Greybar Building. And YOU WAS THERE!
By
Lee Hartsfeld, At
April 7, 2008 at 9:45 AM
Bob and Ray were so good you can be amused in 2008 by their satire of a radio show you never heard, fifty years after the original show vanished from the air. You can be ignorant of every convention of radio and still laugh. I mean, the entire joke of Matt Neffer, Boy Spot-Welder, consisted of shouting "I'm over here, in the kitchen" to indicate that the character had moved from one imaginary space to the other; it's surreal and hilarious. Best of all: if you'd asked them if the feature was a meta-commentary on the medium, you would have gotten blank looks. No, it's just a gag.
Lee's absolutely right; Bob and Ray inhabited the culture they spoofed. But I'm not sure the pop culture that followed was anti-vernacular; it just replaced the old adult vernacular with a perpetually adolescent vernacular, and its values required that criticism be served up hot and loose and self-righteous. Bob and Ray were cool. In all senses of the word.
By
Anonymous, At
April 8, 2008 at 10:57 PM
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