Comedy legend Bob Newhart dead at 94
Bob Newhart’s halting speech was part of his brand, which ushered in an era of such popular comedy shows as Roseanne and Seinfeld.
Bob Newhart, one of the first comedians to star in a TV sitcom based on his stand-up persona, has died at his home in Los Angeles at age 94. His publicist, Jerry Digney, on Thursday confirmed his death.
The stammering Midwesterner, known for his self-deprecating manner and starchy wit, had a gift for making audiences think he was always just playing himself, and at times that was almost true.
He once said Dr Robert Hartley, his popular 1970s role on The Bob Newhart Show, was 85 per cent him, 15 per cent TV character.
Behind the low-key facade was a student of comedy who dissected jokes to figure out why they worked and wove sharp observations about life’s absurdities into his humour.
A career spanning 60 years included several TV series, including five self-styled comedy shows that used his name as its calling card.
More than a dozen film credits include Hell Is for Heroes opposite Steve McQueen (1962), Catch-22 with Alan Arkin (1970), First Family with Gilda Radner (1980) and Elf with Will Ferrell (2003).
As a performer, he played off his image as a guy who might have memorised the tax code, a short man with a hairline that started retreating when he was 15.
His halting speech became part of his brand, but he insisted it was never intentional. “When I first performed, I didn’t study all the working comedians and say, ‘There is nobody stammering out there … what a great opportunity,’ ” he wrote in his 2006 memoir, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This!
He explained: “Truly, that’s … the … way I talk.”
Newhart launched an era that would bring sitcoms like Seinfeld and Roseanne to TV, featuring stand-up comedians playing fictionalised versions of themselves and carrying their comic sensibility.
Child of a plumber
George Robert Newhart was born September 5, 1929, near Chicago in Oak Park, Illinois, the second of four children and the only boy. His father was part owner of a plumbing and heating business who lost his job in the Depression. His mother was a homemaker.
Newhart attended Catholic school and worked during high school and college, taking jobs like setting pins by hand in the local bowling alley. He graduated from Loyola University Chicago in 1952.
With the Korean War under way that year, he was drafted into the US Army and told he would be a field wireman, a dangerous job requiring him to climb telephone poles on a battlefield. He played up his management degree and got assigned stateside, he wrote in his memoir.
A stint at Loyola University’s law school was short-lived. He bounced between jobs including a $US60-a-week position at a Chicago unemployment office. “The unemployed were collecting fifty-five [dollars] and they only had to come in one day a week,” he wrote in his book.
Newhart entered comedy by way of accounting, working as a number-cruncher for drywall manufacturer US Gypsum and paint maker Glidden in Chicago.
Bored, he would improvise, with a friend, screwball phone calls – which they recorded and fruitlessly used as audition tapes for comedy jobs. He saved money by living with his parents until he was 29.
Running out of material
When success finally came, it arrived in a rush. Newhart’s early tapes made their way to a newly created record division at Warner Bros.
An executive who liked his work told Newhart to let him know the next time he performed in a nightclub so a sound crew could record him.
One problem: the comic had never done stand-up in a nightclub. Five months later, he was performing for two weeks at the Tidelands Motor Inn in Houston. On his first evening, he ran out of material and asked the audience which joke they’d like to hear again.
The 1960 record that grew out of those sets, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, was a hit. It became the first comedy record to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Newhart won a Grammy for best album, beating out Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and earned a Grammy for best new artist.
The comedian released a follow-up record the same year, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back, and both albums held the top two spots on the Billboard charts for two consecutive weeks. The record remained until rockers Guns N’ Roses broke it more than 30 years later.
His signature bit involved absurd one-way phone calls, a shtick he would carry over into his TV sitcoms. In one skit on the record, he is a press agent convincing Abraham Lincoln that he should keep the beard and stovepipe hat and not change “four score and seven years ago” to “87 years” in the Gettysburg Address.
The laughter comes in the silences, as the audience imagines what Lincoln is saying on the other end of the line.
In 1962, his first TV show, a sketch comedy series called The Bob Newhart Show, won an Emmy and a Peabody award but was cancelled amid casting disagreements.
Newhart craved a steady job after years on the road performing stand-up. A new Bob Newhart Show, this time a sitcom, made its debut in 1972.
Though he was known as a clean comic – “Mr. P.G.,” he once wrote, referring to the film rating for parental guidance suggested – the show about a Chicago psychologist was slyly subversive. It ventured not only into tricky comic waters around mental health but also into a couple’s bedroom.
In the show, shot with an audience, he and Suzanne Pleshette are married and unapologetically without children, a subject they rarely broach as they focus on their careers and each other. The six-year series was one of the first to show a couple sleeping in the same bed.
Newhart didn’t like the idea of using precocious child characters, considering them the source of unearned laughs. When producers pitched the idea for a baby story line, he read the script and asked: “Who are you going to get to play the part of Bob?”
In 1982, a decade after his first sitcom, Newhart returned with another. Newhart featured him as Dick Loudon, an innkeeper surrounded by a crew of kooky locals in small-town Vermont.
The show might best be known for how it ended in 1990. Newhart gets hit in the head by a golf ball, wakes up next to Pleshette and realises the whole series was a dream. He said the twist was the idea of his wife, Ginnie Newhart.
Not all of his sitcoms were successful. Bob, with the actor as a cartoonist, lasted a year in the early 1990s, and a return in the late 1990s in George & Leo also ran for just a year, with Newhart as mild bookstore owner George Stoody.
In 2013, Newhart won his only Emmy as a performer, for his guest spot on The Big Bang Theory. He continued to perform stand-up into his 90s.
Newhart had four children with his wife, Ginnie Newhart.
In 2002, the comedian was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humour. “We have a saying,” he told the audience. “You can take the boy out of accounting, but you can’t take the accounting out of the boy.”
He waited a beat. “It’s not a very funny saying.”
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