Bob and Ray Tonight: "Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy" (plus Bulletin)

"A blue moon over salmon-pink mountains [isn't] a drink, my good man. I thought you were one of our agents, so I gave you the secret greeting. You see, I'm Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy. Here's my business card."

-- Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy, in "Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy"

by Ken

Luckily I haven't kept count, so I couldn't tell you if I wanted to how many times I've reread, in whole or in part, last night's "Bob and Ray Tonight" offering, the stupendous foreword that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. provided for Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray, with such gently fond remembrance of that Bob and Ray radio broadcast he witnessed the day he was ostensibly there to talk about a writing job, mingled with the undiminished awe he felt at the wonders he witnessed; and the witness he bore to the boys' puzzling melancholy; and finally the eerily accurate appreciation of their humor, culminating in the speculation:

Man is not evil, they seem to say. He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive.

And this I believe.

"Too hilariously stupid" indeed!

As for Kurt's description of Bob and Ray's characters as "almost always fourth-rate or below, engaged in enterprises which, if not contemptible, are at least insane," people who "threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity," well, meet Elmer W. Litzinger, Spy.


FOR THE FINE POINTS OF SPYCRAFT
BOB AND RAY-STYLE, CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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