Product Description
Before Bob & Ray, comedians told jokes. After Bob & Ray, they told stories. When they first got together in 1946 on WHDH-AM Boston, no one guessed that their subtle, intelligent, deadpan brand of humor would revolutionize the comedic landscape.
With a gift for an improvisation and a keen understanding of the absurd, Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding created a universe of wonderful characters and rewrote the rules for what’s funny. Consider any important comedy star since—Bob Newhart, Garrison Keillor, Woody Allen, Johnny Carson, George Carlin, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld—and you can hear the debt to Bob & Ray.
This collection honors the two and only with selections from their early years (1950s, ’60s, and ’70s) and public radio years (’80s), their 1984 Carnegie Hall performances, and previously unreleased archival recordings.
With a gift for an improvisation and a keen understanding of the absurd, Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding created a universe of wonderful characters and rewrote the rules for what’s funny. Consider any important comedy star since—Bob Newhart, Garrison Keillor, Woody Allen, Johnny Carson, George Carlin, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld—and you can hear the debt to Bob & Ray.
This collection honors the two and only with selections from their early years (1950s, ’60s, and ’70s) and public radio years (’80s), their 1984 Carnegie Hall performances, and previously unreleased archival recordings.
Reviews/Praise
—AudioFile
PRAISE FOR BOB AND RAY
“[Bob and Ray] were hilarious without ever indicating they were trying to be so, and there was something about a silent transition from Serious Radio to Comedy that I found wonderful. So count me among the many children of Bob and Ray—I’ll never be their equal, but I will be somebody who interrupts all the serious stuff of radio with Something Different, every time I can.”
—Peter Sagal, author, playwright, screenwriter, actor, and host of Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!
“Stewart and Colbert are good, and I’m a fan. But when I think of great comedy duos, another pair comes to mind first [:] the legendary radio comedy duo 'Bob and Ray'. These guys were absolutely the best at drawing a laugh with an absurd situation, a line, a phrase, an inflection, or a sound.”
—Dale Connelly, writer and radio personality
“Bob & Ray invented . . . a surrealistic Dickensian repertory company, which chastens the fools of the world with hyperbole, slapstick, parody, verbal nonsense, non sequitur, and sheer wit, all of it clean, subtle and gentle... Bob & Ray’s humor turns on their faultless timing and on their infinite sense of the ridiculous.”
—Whitney Balliett, writing in The New Yorker
“Their jokes turn out to be universal—because much of life presents itself as the same dilemma: how to seem lusty and purposeful when less than nothing is going on.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
