R.I.P. Bob Newhart, comedy and TV legend

Bob Newhart, whose plainspoken style and gift for storytelling won over generations of comedy fans, died at the age of 94 on July 18. His 1960 debut album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, was at that time the best-selling comedy LP ever recorded (and one of the best-selling albums, full stop), and his sitcoms The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart are both considered television classics. Mild-mannered and put-upon, Newhart created a persona everyone could relate to, and he excelled at playing the straight man against a cast of crazies, whether they were sitcom co-stars or the characters he’d create onstage, often in one-sided conversations in which the audience only heard Newhart’s flustered reactions.

Newhart was part of a vanguard of stand-ups in the late 1950s who rejected the hammier, vaudeville-influenced shtick of the previous generation in favor of more cynical, down-to-earth material. But while contemporaries like Lenny Bruce, Tom Lehrer, and Elaine May did pointed satire, Newhart’s material was understated, relying on his deadpan reactions. But his act was every bit as cutting-edge as Bruce’s. Since the earliest days of comedy, the form had relied on a jokester and a straight man. Newhart took the jokester out of the equation, giving the audience only reactions and letting them fill in the blanks. Few comedians then or now give their audience as much credit, or have enough faith in their material to deviate so far from the standard setup-punchline routine.  

But Newhart wasn’t just a success on stage. He had one of the longest-running and most successful careers in the history of television, as he parlayed his stand-up success into 1961’s The Bob Newhart Variety Show and began a career on television that continued with very few breaks up through a recurring role on The Big Bang Theory more than fifty years later, netting him six Emmys along the way.

Born George Robert Newhart in Oak Park, Illinois in 1929, Newhart had a placid middle-class upbringing, and true to his unassuming persona, studied accounting at Loyola University. After two years as an Army clerk during the Korean War, he worked as a bookkeeper, while acting in local theater in his off hours. Eventually, he was fired from his bookkeeping job for his motto, “that’s close enough,” and became a clerk in the unemployment office. He quit that job when he realized he was being paid $55 a week, the unemployed were being given $45 and they only had to show up in the office for an hour a week. 

He then went to work as an advertising copywriter and, while bored at work, he would call co-worker Ed Gallagher, and the two would spin out absurd conversations in character. The duo started recording their calls, which they tried to sell to radio stations as comedy bits. But when Gallagher moved away, Newhart continued to do the bits, simply leaving pauses where Gallagher would have been talking. He had struck comedy gold. With half the conversation left to the audience’s imagination, the bit was stripped down to Newhart’s exasperated reactions, which he sold with impeccable timing.

Newhart continued to try and sell tapes of his act to radio, and eventually a disc jockey passed his material on to a talent scout for Warner Brothers Records. Newhart wanted to call his first album The Most Celebrated Comedian Since Attila The Hun; the label insisted on The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart (the Attila joke survived as the subtitle). It was an immediate, massive, hit. Button-Down Mind won Newhart a Grammy for Best New Artist, something no comedian has done before or since. He also beat out Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Harry Belafonte for Album of the Year, and won Best Comedy Performance for a different album from that same year (follow-up The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back). The 30-year-old accountant was suddenly the biggest star in comedy.

Television was eager to capitalize. In 1961, Newhart hosted a variety show called The Bob Newhart Show, a low-rated critical darling which won an Emmy and a Peabody. He started spending less time on the stand-up circuit, and more time pursuing film and television roles, appearing in Hell Is For Heroes, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Catch-22, and The Rescuers. It would be ten years of balancing small film roles, TV guest appearances, and comedy albums, before he got another television show of his own—a sitcom, this time, also called The Bob Newhart Show.

This Bob Newhart Show was a critical favorite as well, considered one of the best sitcoms of all time. But it was also a hit, spending its first three seasons in the top 20. When ratings slipped during the fourth and fifth season, Newhart considered shutting down production, but received so much fan mail asking him not to he stayed on for a sixth, saying the outpouring, “almost made me cry.” On the show, Newhart played Dr. Bob Hartley, a psychologist, who played straight man to a colorful cast of colleagues, neighbors, and patients. Like the show’s lead-in, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the action was split between Bob’s home and work life, giving him a large cast to bounce off of. Suzanne Pleshette played his sarcastic wife Emily, Marcia Wallace (later a regular on The Simpsons) was his receptionist, and Henry Winkler, Howard Hesseman, Teri Garr, and Raúl Julia all appeared in recurring roles. Newhart’s one-sided phone conversations became a recurring gag on the series.

Once his first sitcom ended, Newhart wasted little time before headlining another, Newhart. He was again the calm, befuddled center in the midst of chaos, this time as Dick Loudon, the proprietor of a bed and breakfast in a small Vermont town populated almost exclusively by oddballs. The cast included Mary Frann as Dick’s wife, Joanna, Bob Newhart Show alum Tom Poston as the inn’s dim-witted handyman, and Julia Duffy and Peter Scolari as a pair of self-absorbed yuppies. The show was just as big a hit as his previous effort, and lasted eight years. The last episode of the series, in which Dick wakes up in bed with Pleshette, revealing the entire series had been a dream of Bob Hartley’s, is remembered as one of the best finales in television history.

Newhart tried again in 1992, with Bob, which co-starred a pre-Friends Lisa Kudrow. The ratings were low, and the series was canceled early in its second season. But Newhart was back on TV in 1997, joking that after The Bob Newhart Show, Newhart, and Bob, his next show would be called The. In fact, it was called George & Leo, and co-starred Judd Hirsch and Jason Bateman, but didn’t last a full season.

While he was no longer a headliner on TV, Newhart never stopped working. He did a stand-up tour doing classic bits, joking that he had rewritten some of the dialogue because it was unnerving seeing the audience mouthing all the words. Showtime invited him to do a comedy special in 1995, the first one of his career. In 2003, he did a three-episode arc on ER, a dramatic role that won him another Emmy nomination, and had memorable supporting roles in Elf and Legally Blonde 2 that same year. And in 2013, at age 84, he began a recurring role on The Big Bang Theory, relishing the chance to work in front of a live studio audience, as he had with his own classic sitcoms.

In his personal life, Newhart seemed to be as down-to-earth as his onscreen persona. He was married to Virginia Quinn for 60 years, and the couple had four children and nine grandchildren. He maintained lifelong friendships with other comics, including Don Rickles, and Buddy Hackett (who introduced him to his wife). He leaves behind a comedy legacy that few can match.