Bob and Ray - Television

Television

In the early 1950s, the two had their own 15-minute television series, entitled simply Bob & Ray. It began November 26, 1951 on NBC with Audrey Meadows as a cast regular. During the second season, the title changed to Club Embassy, and Cloris Leachman joined the cast as a regular, replacing Audrey Meadows who left the series to join the cast of "The Jackie Gleason Show" on CBS. In the soap opera parodies, the actresses took the roles of Mary Backstayge and Linda Lovely. Expanding to a half-hour for the summer of 1952 only, the series continued until September 28, 1953. When The Higgins Boys and Gruber show began on The Comedy Channel in 1989, it occasionally included full episodes of Bob and Ray's 1951-53 shows (along with episodes of Clutch Cargo and Supercar).

The duo did more television in the latter part of their career, beginning with key roles of Bud Williams, Jr. (Elliott) and Walter Gesunheit (Goulding) in Kurt Vonnegut's Hugo-nominated Between Time and Timbuktu: A Space Fantasy (1972), adapted from several Vonnegut novels and stories. (Vonnegut had once submitted comedy material to Bob and Ray.) Fred Barzyk directed this WGBH/PBS production, a science-fiction comedy about an astronaut-poet's journey through the Chrono-Synclasic Infundibulum. This teleplay was first published in an edition that featured numerous screenshots of Bob and Ray and other cast members.

Bob and Ray also hosted a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman game show, The Name's the Same, which was emceed originally by Robert Q. Lewis. Bob and Ray would do their typical routines, and then play the normal game of having a celebrity panel try to guess the contestants' famous names. They would always end the show with their traditional closing: Ray saying, "Write if you get work..." and Bob finishing with "And hang by your thumbs."

During the late 1950s, Bob and Ray were also on radio and television as the voices of Bert and Harry Piel, two animated characters from a very successful ad campaign for Piels Beer. Since this was a regional beer, the commercials were not seen nationally, but even so, the popularity of the ad campaign resulted in national press coverage. Based on the success of those commercials, they launched a successful advertising voice-over company, Goulding Elliott Greybar (so called because the offices were located in the Greybar Building).

In 1971, Bob and Ray lent their voices to the children's television program The Electric Company in a pair of short animated films; in one, explaining opposites, Ray was the "writer of words", first for elevators, then doors, finally faucets. The other, illustrating words ending in -at, had Ray as "Lorezo the Magnificent" who can read minds and who tries to read a word in Bob's mind, that he thinks is an -at word such as "hat", "bat", "rat", "cat", "mat", etc. (Turns out, it wasn't; Bob's word was actually "Columbus".)

In 1973, Bob and Ray created an historic television program that was broadcast on two channels: one half of the studio was broadcast on the New York PBS affiliate WNET, and the other half of the studio was broadcast on independent station WNEW. Four sketches were performed, including a tug of war that served as an allegory about nuclear war. The two parts of the program are available for viewing at the Museum of Television & Radio.

In 1979 they returned to national TV for a one-shot NBC special with members of the original Saturday Night Live cast, Bob & Ray, Jane & Laraine & Gilda. It included a skit that successfully captured their unique approach to humor: They sat in chairs, in business suits, facing the audience, pretty much motionless, and sang a duet of Rod Stewart's major hit "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"

In 1980 they taped a one-hour pilot for CBS late night with the cast of SCTV titled From Cleveland, a sketch show staged on location in Cleveland. The show became a cult favorite with numerous showings at the Museum of Television & Radio.

This was followed by a series of specials for PBS in the early 1980s.

Bob and Ray also appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show several times in the late 1950s and early '60s; guested on the Johnny Carson and David Letterman shows throughout the 1970s and '80s; provided voices for the animated 1981 special B.C.: A Special Christmas, and made guest appearances on episodes of The David Steinberg Show, Happy Days, and Trapper John, M.D..