Kidders of the Clich

By T.E. Kalem

Comedy is criticism. --Louis Kronenberger

Let us begin the theater season with a new dramatic prize. It will be called the Bob and Ray Award. It will be bestowed on any show that proves to be excruciatingly funny. It is hereby given to Bob and Ray--The Two and Only.

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were absurdists before the theater of the absurd received its name tag. Their basic comic building block was, and still is, the radio or TV interview. In one of these, the president of S.T.O.A., for Slow Talkers of America, is being interviewed. The deliberately spaced speech of the S.T.O.A. man gradually rattles and irritates the interviewer. He begins trying to speed things up by finishing the S.T.O.A. man's sentences. It doesn't work. The S.T.O.A. man continues to munch each sentence 32 times, and the interviewer drops off to sleep as the interviewee gets in the last agonizing word. Another interview features a famed raconteur who cannot recall the punch lines to his stories but finally remembers a punch line without any anecdote to go with it. One wickedly funny parody of a news commentator, David Chetley, achieves a masterly mimicry of the arch pauses and polysyllabic whimsy of David Brinkley.

Such descriptions merely skim the surface of Bob and Ray's comedy. They are superior cliche kidders and satirists of the first order; they record things almost exactly as they are heard and seen every day--and then they take that one subtle, savage, farcical step over the brink into the inane.

"Comedy is criticism" means that the comic spirit jabs a deflationary hatpin into vanity and pretension and pomposity--just as Bob and Ray do. Their comedy reflects a society that is inundated with talk. Their chief target, the interview show, affords a shock of rueful recognition to everyone, for who has not spent hours of his own prime time listening to the dull conversing with the fatuous, or to Babel lecturing Babbitt? Bob and Ray have thrown a net into this noisy, restless, self-important sea of totally irrelevant information and fished up the audience's own image in bursting bubbles of humor.

o T.E. Kalem

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