Outside the Beltway

Bob Newhart, 1929-2024

The legendary comedian is gone at 94.

James Joyner · Sunday, July 21, 2024 · 3 comments

Neil Genzlinger, New York Times, “Bob Newhart, 94, Dies; Soft-Spoken Everyman Became a Comedy Star“

Bob Newhart, who burst onto the comedy scene in 1960 working a stammering Everyman character not unlike himself, then rode essentially that same character through a long, busy career that included two of television’s most memorable sitcoms, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.

His publicist, Jerry Digney, confirmed the death.

Mr. Newhart wasn’t merely unknown a few months before his emergence as a full-fledged star; he was barely in the business, though he had aspirations. In 1959, some comic tapes he had made to amuse himself while working as an accountant in Chicago caught the ear of an executive at Warner Bros. Records, which in 1960 released the comedy album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.”

The record shot to No. 1 on the charts, and at the 1961 Grammy Awards it improbably captured the top prize, album of the year. Among the nominees Mr. Newhart bested: Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte and Frank Sinatra.

He won two other Grammys that year as well, for best new artist and best spoken-word comedy performance, an honor that was given not to his first album but to his second, a hastily made follow-up titled “The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!” For a while, his first two albums occupied the top two spots on the Billboard album chart.

“Playboy magazine hailed me ‘the best new comedian of the decade,’” Mr. Newhart wrote in his autobiography, “I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny” (2006), describing this period. “Of course, there were still nine more years left in the decade.”

Unlike many entertainers who achieve fame almost overnight, Mr. Newhart was able to handle the unexpected success of the “Button-Down Mind” albums. He transitioned quickly and easily into television, landing a short-lived variety show, numerous guest appearances on the shows of Dean Martin and Ed Sullivan, regular work guest-hosting for Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show” and, ultimately, “The Bob Newhart Show,” a celebrated sitcom in which he played a somewhat befuddled psychologist.

That series ran from 1972 to 1978, and in 1982 he followed it up with “Newhart,” another successful sitcom, in which he played a Vermont innkeeper. “Newhart” ran for eight seasons and ended with what is still viewed as one of the greatest finales in television history.

Mr. Newhart remained busy in television and films into his 80s. He won an Emmy in 2013 for a guest appearance as the beloved former host of a TV science show on “The Big Bang Theory.” He was nominated again for the same role a year later but lost to Jimmy Fallon, who won for hosting an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” And he reprised the role a few times, most recently in a 2020 voice-over, on the “Big Bang Theory” prequel series “Young Sheldon.”

That Emmy was, surprisingly, his first. He had been nominated but winless at the Emmys of 1962, for writing; 1985, 1986 and 1987, as lead actor in a comedy (“Newhart”); 2004, as guest actor in a drama series, for his role in three episodes of “ER” as an architect losing his sight; and 2009, for his supporting role in the TV movie “The Librarian: The Curse of the Judas Chalice.”

Though he personally did not win an Emmy until he had been on television for half a century, his variety show — which ran for a single season in 1961-62 and which, like his later sitcom, was called “The Bob Newhart Show” — did win, in a category then called outstanding program achievement in the field of humor. It beat out “The Andy Griffith Show,” “The Red Skelton Show,” “Hazel” and “Car 54, Where Are You?”

“I think the whole awards-giving process needs rethinking,” Mr. Newhart wrote in his autobiography. “For starters, they should bestow lifetime achievement awards at the beginning of a performer’s career. This way the person can still enjoy it while he is young, rather than giving it to him when he has lost most of his marbles and is standing onstage wondering why all these overdressed people are applauding.”

“I think the whole awards-giving process needs rethinking,” Mr. Newhart wrote in his autobiography. “For starters, they should bestow lifetime achievement awards at the beginning of a performer’s career. This way the person can still enjoy it while he is young, rather than giving it to him when he has lost most of his marbles and is standing onstage wondering why all these overdressed people are applauding.”

Nonetheless, he did not object when in 2002 he was given the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Matt Schudel, Washington Post, “Bob Newhart, who went from standup comedy to sitcom star, dies at 94.“

Bob Newhart was still living with his parents when he was 30. He was a balding, slouch-eyed former accountant who talked in a calculated, halting stammer. He was no one’s idea of a superstar.

Yet, within a year, his understated comedy routines that emphasized the absurdities of ordinary life made him a national sensation. Mr. Newhart, who died July 18 at 94, became the first comedian with a No. 1 record and the star of two long-running sitcoms. Regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern comedy, he helped shape the humor of Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld, among others.

His debut album, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” soared past the pop and rock recordings of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley to stand at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for 14 weeks in 1960. It was the first comedy album to sell more than 1 million copies, and Mr. Newhart remains the only comedian to win Grammy Awards for best new artist and album of the year.

He didn’t emerge from the traditional proving ground of nightclubs but relied on recordings to propel his popularity. In fact, the first time he performed in a nightclub was when he recorded “The Button-Down Mind.”

Mr. Newhart’s best-selling records helped him become one of the first comedians to develop a following on college campuses. With his suit and tie and his subdued manner, he looked like a junior executive who wandered across the hall from a business meeting to describe a world wobbling off its axis.

[…]

“The comedy was intelligent,” comedian Tommy Smothers told the Chicago Tribune in 2002, the year Mr. Newhart was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center. “And Bob had that wonderful sense of space — that timing that was so essential to the comedy. He never really told hard jokes. It was attitude and inflection — and the space when you picked those words up. That was his great gift.”

By looking at familiar situations from fresh angles, Mr. Newhart uncovered an original brand of humor: He portrayed a driving instructor with a clueless student; the beleaguered commander of a nuclear submarine, the USS Codfish, with a mutinous crew; and a bus-driving teacher who schools his students on the proper way to leave passengers at the curb: “What you want to do is just kind of gradually ease out. You’re kind of always holding out the hope they can catch up with the bus, you know what I mean? … Did you see how he slammed the door right in her face that time? That’s called your perfect pullout.”

One of Mr. Newhart’s major contributions to comedy was to deliver essentially a “straight-man” routine, with the audience hearing only one side of an increasingly desperate conversation, often in the form of a phone call.

“Listen, Abe,” he imagined a press agent telling President Abraham Lincoln, “what’s the problem? You’re thinking of shaving it off? Uh, Abe, don’t you see, that’s part of the image?”

[…]

“The Bob Newhart Show,” which ran on CBS from 1972 to 1978, was part of a formidable CBS Saturday comedy lineup, along with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “All in the Family” and “The Carol Burnett Show.” Mr. Newhart played a Chicago psychologist coping with the comic foibles of his clients.

His wife on the show was played by throaty-voiced actress Suzanne Pleshette. Mr. Newhart insisted that the couple be childless.

“I didn’t want to do a certain kind of show, which was the dumb father who keeps getting in these pickles and these precocious children and mother get him out of it,” he told the Newark Star-Ledger in 2001. “That was one of the few conditions that I insisted on, and I think it was one of the factors that made the show work.”

On “Newhart,” which ran on CBS from 1982 to 1990, he portrayed a guidebook-writer-turned-Vermont-innkeeper dealing with a cast of eccentric locals. The final episode became one of the most memorable in television history.

After being knocked unconscious by an errant golf ball, Mr. Newhart awakes alongside Pleshette in the bed of their Chicago bedroom, last seen 12 years earlier on “The Bob Newhart Show.”

“Honey, wake up,” Mr. Newhart says, “you won’t believe the dream I just had.”

“All right, Bob,” says Pleshette, as the live audience gasps and applauds in recognition. “What is it?”

“I was an innkeeper,” Mr. Newhart explains, “in this crazy little town in Vermont.”

Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times, “Bob Newhart, deadpan comedian who became a sitcom and movie star, dies at 94“

Bob Newhart, the “button-down” stand-up comedy sensation of the 1960s who parlayed his low-key, Everyman demeanor and trademark stammering delivery into sitcom gold as the star of two classic TV series in the 1970s and ’80s, has died in Los Angeles.

[…]

“Without moving much, without shouting, Mr. Newhart can squeeze more out of an innocuous line than anybody else in the business,” New York Times writer John J. O’Connor wrote when “Newhart” debuted.

“His is not a world of wisecracks. He is a master of timing and delivery. There is no nastiness or hip trendiness. He is simply very funny.”

[…]

“If normalcy is a gimmick, Bob Newhart had one of stand-up comedy’s greatest hooks,” Gerald Nachman wrote in his 2003 book, “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s.”

Of all the revolutionary comedians of the era such as Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Shelley Berman, Nachman wrote, “Newhart was the most Everyman of them all — nonethnic, nonabrasive, non-angst-ridden, non-you-name-it. … His mild-mannered, quizzical nature worked like a sedative for the increasing craziness of the time.”

[…]

Newhart, who received three Emmy nominations as lead actor in a comedy series while doing “Newhart,” believed the secret to his enduring success on TV was simple.

“I’ve often been told I pretty much play myself on television. And to a degree, that’s true,” he told the Rocky Mountain News in 2000. “I’m always the guy who considers himself the last sane man left on Earth. And it has worked for me.”

Associated Press, “Comedian Bob Newhart, deadpan master of sitcoms and telephone monologues, dies at 94“

Bob Newhart, the deadpan accountant-turned-comedian who became one of the most popular TV stars of his time after striking gold with a classic comedy album, has died at 94.

[…]

While other comedians of the time, including Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Alan King, and Mike Nichols and Elaine May, frequently got laughs with their aggressive attacks on modern mores, Newhart was an anomaly. His outlook was modern, but he rarely raised his voice above a hesitant, almost stammering delivery. His only prop was a telephone, used to pretend to hold a conversation with someone on the other end of the line.

[…]

Newhart was initially wary of signing on to a weekly TV series, fearing it would overexpose his material. Nevertheless, he accepted an attractive offer from NBC, and “The Bob Newhart Show” premiered on Oct. 11, 1961. Despite Emmy and Peabody awards, the half-hour variety show was canceled after one season, a source for jokes by Newhart for decades after.

He waited 10 years before undertaking another “Bob Newhart Show” in 1972. This one was a situation comedy with Newhart playing a Chicago psychologist living in a penthouse with his schoolteacher wife, Suzanne Pleshette. Their neighbors and his patients, notably Bill Daily as an airline navigator, were a wacky, neurotic bunch who provided an ideal counterpoint to Newhart’s deadpan commentary.

Travis M. Andrews, Washington Post, “Bob Newhart was a gentle soul in a town that often crushes them“

Bob Newhart was too gentle for Hollywood.

His breakneck ascendancy in the 1960s violates every unwritten rule about fame, fortune and success. He didn’t test audience’s comfort levels or make bold political statements. He wasn’t loud or flashy or cruel or caustic or callous or cynical or angry or ruthless or power-hungry.

He stammered.

He wasn’t the everyman, despite what every obituary will claim, because no one is — and because most men are far less gentle.

[…]

Newhart’s stand-up — crisp, clean, and observational, which put it at odds with the day’s popular acts like Lenny Bruce and Don Rickles — made him a buttoned-up star, playing college campuses across the country in a suit, as if he’d just strolled over from an accounting firm.

[…]

We don’t live in a world, or a country, that often rewards kindness and gentleness with fame and fortune. But those qualities led the tributes that poured onto social media after Newhart died Thursday at 94.

Billy Crystal called him “a gentle wonderful man.” Judd Apatow tweeted he was “the kindest most hilarious man” with a “gentle spirit.” Actor David Pressman tweeted he “was so unbelievably supportive and kind.”

A theme emerges.

Carol Burnett: “He was as kind and nice as he was funny.”

Jason Alexander: He “was as kind as he was funny.”

“Every time I met Bob Newhart, he was EXACTLY Bob Newhart: witty, graceful, low-key, and friendly,” wrote film critic Richard Roeper.

Newhart would probably be uncomfortable with the lip service. So consider this anecdote, instead: During the rise of the #MeToo movement, my colleague Monica Hesse asked several women which celebrity, if discovered to be a predator, would most disappoint them. One woman said Bob Newhart.

After the resulting piece published, Newhart read it and contacted Hesse and her source, telling them he was moved by their confidence, and that he promised not to disappoint them.

That gentleness, that generosity of sprit — that almost radical kindness — infused his work.

Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times, “Bob Newhart was a timeless comedic genius whose quiet delivery made him a star“

The nice thing would be to wake up and find oneself in bed in a Chicago apartment between Bob and Emily, or in a Vermont inn with Dick and Joanna, and find that this was all a dream. Sadly, the world doesn’t work that way. Bob Newhart has left the stage for the last time, and the dream is over.

Newhart, who died Thursday at the age of 94, was a quiet comic giant whose sneaky genius ruled comedy across seven decades and whose name was attached to four fine sitcoms — “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Newhart,” “Bob” and “George and Leo,” his actual first name being George — and a drinking game, “Hi, Bob.” (Pardon me while I sip.)

[…]

In the early 1960s, comics did not tell you about themselves the way they do now; authenticity was not a quality comedy prized. They worked behind created personas, or they presented little playlets — this was as true of Lenny Bruce as it was of Nichols and May or Shelley Berman (who, like Newhart, employed the one-sided phone conversation). They might show you who they were by the way they processed the world into a routine; Newhart estimated that his character “is about 85% me, the other 15% being an extremely … sick mind that enjoys the macabre.” But they wouldn’t draw you a picture.

There is no “I” in Newhart’s classic stand-up, past “I was reading in the paper today” or “I think it might go something like this.” About all you could learn about him from his stage act is that he was from Chicago, worked as an accountant (“I had a kind of strange theory of accountancy — if you got within two or three bucks of it … but it never caught on”) and had a job in the unemployment office until he realized he made only $10 more than his clients, “and they only had to come in once a week.”

Newhart was outwardly, if deceptively, the picture of midcentury American crew-cut, suit-and-tie normalcy — a blank canvas on which he painted his characters. Plausible as a driving instructor or a rocket scientist or Clark Kent trying to get his Superman suit out of the dry cleaners, he would address an implied partner sitting invisibly next to him or on the other end of an imaginary phone line. (“The audience participates,” he told one interviewer, of the gaps the listener filled in. “In terms of McLuhan, it isn’t a cool medium, it becomes a hot medium.”)

[…]

The cultural impact of a long-running show in the days when three networks owned the air, producing some two dozen episodes a year, cannot be understated. And Newhart had two of them, both on CBS — there are 142 episodes of the impeccable “The Bob Newhart Show,” which ran from 1972 to 1978, where he played psychologist Robert Hartley opposite Suzanne Pleshette, and 184 of “Newhart,” airing from 1982 to 1990, in which he played innkeeper Dick Loudon opposite Mary Frann. (I am a fan as well of the less successful “Bob,” with Newhart as a greeting card artist, and “George and Leo,” which paired him “Odd Couple”-style with Judd Hirsch.) Situation comedies are not just shows to watch but places to go; we live alongside the characters, across time. We react to the comedy so strongly because we know them so well, we know where they’re headed, what they mean. Bob was family.

His mastery of one-sided conversations notwithstanding, “The Bob Newhart Show” demonstrated that its star’s true artistry emerged when he had other actors to play off and react to. Audience expectations meant that there were always phone calls to be made — a drunken call to a Chinese restaurant attempting to order moo goo gai pan is one of the series’ signature moments. In both “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart,” as a comparatively sensible person beset by eccentrics, he could get a lot of mileage out of a simple “Why?” His version of a double take was a blank stare, his weapon the throwaway ironic remark.

Relatively few sitcoms were interested in adult married couples when “The Bob Newhart Show” went on the air, and especially one without the baggage of children. The Hartleys and the Loudons were not without irritation or annoyance in their relationships, but they were attractive, attracted people, sexual by implication. Not only did Bob and Emily share a bed, which was terribly modern for 1972 TV, but the bed was a stage; some of their best comedy was played in it, lying side by side. When “Newhart” suddenly morphed into “The Bob Newhart Show” in its famous final moments, suggesting the entire later series had been Bob Hartley’s dream, it was to that bed it magnetically returned. The studio audience began applauding as soon as the set (which had been kept secret from the cast and crew) was revealed, even before Pleshette rose from beneath the covers.

Apart from late-career dramatic roles, Newhart brought the same comic toolbox to every assignment, whether as Will Ferrell’s adoptive father in the Christmas perennial “Elf” or Jim Parsons’ childhood idol in “The Big Bang Theory.” Because he was choosy, or was lucky enough to work with writers who knew what to do with him, or just because he was so very good, so completely himself, it’s hard to find a dud appearance at any stage of his long career. “Catch-22” might have been an awkward film of the book, but there’s nothing wrong with Newhart’s Maj. Major Major Major.

His timing was exquisite, his delivery musical in a light, dry way. (He did not like to be called “deadpan” or “mild-mannered.”) That he began on the radio, as “a poor man’s Bob & Ray,” perhaps attuned him to the power of the pause, the uses of silence. His natural tendency to stammer — “which I think is a sign of intelligence but I can find no evidence that supports that” — was built into his stop-start delivery. A breath taken before the end of a sentence would turn the final word into a firecracker.

It’s rare that I’ll blog on news that’s three days old but I’ve been busy with the start of a new academic year and didn’t want to let Newhart’s passing go without mention.

When someone who became a star before I was born and continued that into my childhood passes, it has usually been decades since they were professionally relevant. That wasn’t the case with Newhart, who was still working until near the end.

Newhart was well into middle age when I was watching “The Bob Newhart” show as a child. And, while I enjoyed his appearances with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” I was only tangentially aware of his early superstardom as a standup until it was highlighted in the first season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

To have that career and then two legendary series is just remarkable. Offhand, the only ones in that company are Bill Cosby (“I Spy,” “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,” and “The Cosby Show”) and Jerry Seinfeld (“Seinfeld” and “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”).

His later series attempts were not nearly as successful—an absurdly high bar—but I actually enjoyed “George and Leo” quite a bit. His turn as Papa Elf in the movie “Elf” was fantastic. And he finally won the Emmy for his turn on “The Big Bang Theory” decades later.

Dying at 94 is hardly a tragedy. It was a full life well lived.