Loony Logic

By Christopher Porterfield

WRITE IF YOU GET WORK: THE BEST OF BOB & RAY by BOB ELLIOTT and RAY GOULDING 177 pages. Random House. $6.95.

Deadpan parodists work perilously close to their targets. If they miscalculate, they may be mistaken for the real thing. But if they maintain just enough distance, they can cause the real thing to be mistaken for them. This explains why half the shows on radio and TV nowadays sound suspiciously like Bob & Ray spoofs. In their 29 years as a comedy team -- mostly on radio, with excursions into TV and Broadway -- Bob Elliott, 52, and Ray Goulding, 53, have rarely misjudged that ironic remove. As a result, newscasts, soap operas, man-in-the-street interviews, sports features and public service announcements, among other detritus of the air waves, can never seem quite the same.

Bob & Ray's ridicule is a shoe that fits so many feet it scarcely matters which one it was taken from. No prior knowledge of Mary Margaret McBride is necessary to enjoy their Mary McGoon, with her recipe for frozen ginger ale salad. One need never have heard Mary Noble, Backstage Wife to enjoy the hilariously muddled banalities of their Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife.

They have managed to outlast most of their original targets without even be ginning to run out of material -- a fact which they are currently demonstrating every weekday afternoon on radio station WOR in New York City.

Bare Scripts. As Bob & Ray see it, the world of broadcasting -- and by implication the world -- follows a loony logic based on the laws of improbability.

A self-styled presidential impersonator does impressions of Van Buren, Madison and Polk without ever changing his voice. On a program featuring hard-luck stories, a contestant with a pain fully stooped back is awarded a free trip to the top of the Statue of Liberty.

A cranberry grower being interviewed by intrepid Roving Reporter Wally Ballou is surprised to learn of such things as cranberry juice and cranberry jelly, and rushes off with these new-found uses for his product.

Write If You Get Work is a representative sampling of the thousands of such routines Bob & Ray have created over the years. As a book, it is a little underfurnished. There is no commentary, no analysis, only the bare scripts ac companied by a few photos. Yet it escapes nonbook status, thanks to the peculiarly literary nature of Bob & Ray's medium. From Fred Allen's 1954 Tread mill to Oblivion to the recent multi-volume compilations of the BBC's Goon Show, reprinted radio routines have proved surprisingly readable, and for sound reason. Alone among comedy forms, they celebrate the primacy of the word .

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