Bob Newhart has died, at 94. Newhart was known to generations of television viewers as the star of two hit sitcoms, The Bob Newhart Show (which ran from 1972 to ’78), in which he played a Chicago psychologist, and Newhart (which ran from 1982 to ’90), in which he played a Vermont innkeeper, author, and sometime local TV host.
Only a select few television stars could be the lead in two different hit shows, let alone as a central star around whom everything revolved. He will probably have his longest afterlife in pop culture for his role as Papa Elf in Will Ferrell’s 2003 Christmas comedy Elf, and he won an Emmy for a recurring guest role as Professor Proton on The Big Bang Theory.
Newhart was also a rarity in comedy, a normal and reasonably well-adjusted person. He was a devout Catholic, with a sister who was a nun; he remarked that “I think God has an incredible sense of humor. All you have to do is look around the world. There’s no question that He has an incredible sense of humor.” He was married to his wife, Ginny, for 60 years until her death in 2023. He told an interviewer in 2020, “I have four kids and 10 grandchildren. I’ve always said: I don’t care how successful you’ve been in this business, if you haven’t had a good family life, what have you really achieved? Not an awful lot. You can be the richest man in the world and look back at your marriages that were disasters and what have you really accomplished? That’s the way I look at life.” He credited Ginny for giving him the idea to end Newhart with an it-was-all-a-dream sequence that brought back his wife from The Bob Newhart Show, Suzanne Pleshette; it remains one of TV’s most popular series conclusions.
Before stand-up comedy, Newhart was an accountant and did a tour in the Army, and he always projected a level-headed Midwestern-ness leavened by his status as a long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan. Comedy is a field full of what are often very messed-up people who learned to make themselves and others laugh as a defense mechanism, but Newhart’s comedy (which was always G-rated) was built around his persona as a sane man in a world gone mad. His odd-couple best friendship with Don Rickles led Newhart to crack, when roasting Rickles, that Rickles being his best friend proved how difficult it was for him to make friends.
Newhart’s most brilliant work, which made him a star, was as a stand-up, captured in a series of comedy albums starting with 1960’s The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. The album won him the Best New Artist award at the Grammys (unusual for a comedian) and, according to a story in Variety, “was the first comedy album ever to hit the top of the Billboard charts, saving the then-struggling Warner Bros. Records in the process, and his first two albums held the Billboard Nos. 1 and 2 spots simultaneously, a feat unequaled until Guns N’ Roses did it with a pair of discs in 1991.”
Newhart’s signature was long-form routines in which he delivered one end of a conversation, often in a phone conversation, leaving the audience to imagine the other half. He’d be a press agent advising Abraham Lincoln on the Gettysburg Address, a promoter having to hear Abner Doubleday explain the rules of baseball, a driving instructor, or the captain of a submarine talking to his crew. The gimmick wasn’t entirely Newhart’s invention; Jack Benny used to do something similar with a telephone as a prop on his show. But Newhart blazed new trails with it, and his incisive routines (some of which he was still performing live to great effect decades later) were revolutionary because the audience only heard the straight man. The zany stuff had to be imagined from Newhart’s stammering, deadpan reactions to what we assumed he was being told. That feat of comedic creativity was never quite replicated by the comics who came after him, but it opened a lot of vistas for stand-ups like Steven Wright, Steve Martin, and Norm MacDonald to think differently about the possibilities of what a comedy act could be. R.I.P.