Books in Brief: From Approximately Coast to Coast . . . It’s the Bob and Ray Show

From Approximately Coast to Coast . . . It’s the Bob and Ray Show, by Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding (Atheneum, 216 pp., $13.95)

Bob and Ray, radio’s answer to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, have a new book out, a gentle, irresistible mixture of low-key surrealism and Perelmanesque satire minus the Yiddishisms, which is every bit as funny as their previous book, the 1975 Write if You Get Work. In this volume, Wally Ballou does an assortment of star turns, holding forth on such vital topics of the day as paper clips, the common man, and cameras in the courtroom; Harlowe P. Whitcomb, president and recording secretary of the Slow Talkers of America, lurches haltingly through a four-page interview; Edgar Fanshaw of the Ambiguous Signs Company discusses his unique new method for increasing city revenues; Rex Grippner of WVTV-TV in Baraboo, Wisconsin, camps out on the lawn of Buckingham Palace, resolving not to leave until Prince Charles comes out and grants him an exclusive royal interview. (“I know you’re in there, Charlie! And the longer you hold out, the longer I’m gonna be.”) One misses the familiar, ultra-dry delivery of Bob and Ray in person, but it isn’t all that hard to reconstruct in the mind’s ear; besides, it’s almost as much fun to read these wonderful radio scripts out loud all by yourself.