Slow talk, for a change
Today is the anniversary of the birth of Ray Goulding. Goulding was responsible for precisely one-half of the hilarity generated with Bob Elliott in the comedy duo Bob & Ray. Goulding died in 1990; Elliott celebrates his eighty-fifth birthday later this month. Whitney Balliett perfectly described the comedy of Bob & Ray in his New Yorker profile of the duo:
Bob & Ray invented, dreamed up the lines for, and then played, mainly on radio and television, 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. It is also framed by that special sly, dry, wasteless vision of life perfected during the last couple of centuries by middle-class New Englanders...In the video below, Ray blows a gasket interviewing Harlow T. Whitcomb, president of the Slow Talkers of America, converting exasperation into an art form. Watch it only if you can tolerate brilliant silliness.
