Bob Newhart, Icon of Deadpan Humor, Dies at 94 – National

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

Jerry Digney, Newhart’s publicist, said the actor died Thursday in Los Angeles after a series of brief illnesses.

Newhart, best known today as the star of two hit television shows of the 1970s and 1980s that bore his name, launched his stand-up comedy career in the late 1950s. He gained national fame when his routine was recorded on vinyl in 1960 as The Buttoned Mind of Bob Newhartwhich won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

While other comedians of the era, including Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Alan King, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, often drew 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 stuttering tone. His only prop was a telephone, which he used to pretend to be holding a conversation with someone on the other end.

In one memorable sketch, he played a Madison Avenue image maker trying to explain to Abraham Lincoln how to improve the Gettysburg Address: “Say 87 years ago instead of eighty-seven years ago,” he advised.

Another favorite was Marketing the Wright Brothersin which he tried to persuade aviation pioneers to start an airline, even though he acknowledged that the distance of their inaugural flight might limit them.

“Well, you see, it’s going to hurt our arrival time on shore if we have to land every 105 feet.”

Newhart was initially reluctant to sign on for a weekly television series, fearing it would overexpose his work. Nevertheless, he accepted an attractive offer from NBC and The Bob Newhart Show premiered on October 11, 1961. Despite Emmy and Peabody awards, the half-hour variety show was canceled after one season, a source of Newhart jokes for decades.

He waited 10 years before undertaking another The Bob Newhart Show in 1972. It was a sitcom in which Newhart played a Chicago psychologist living in a penthouse with his schoolteacher wife, Suzanne Pleshette. Their neighbors and patients, including Bill Daily as an airline navigator, were a bunch of neurotic lunatics who provided an ideal counterpoint to Newhart’s deadpan commentary.

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Interview with Bob Newhart

The series, one of the most acclaimed of the 1970s, aired until 1978.

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Four years later, the comedian launched another show, simply called Newhart. This time it was about a successful New York writer who decides to reopen a long-closed Vermont inn. Newhart was again a calm, reasonable man surrounded by a group of local eccentrics. The series was again a huge hit, running for eight seasons on CBS.

The film ended memorably in 1990, when Newhart, in his old Chicago psychologist persona, wakes up in bed with Pleshette, grimacing as he tells her about the strange dream he had: “I was an innkeeper in a crazy little town in Vermont. … The handyman had nothing to do with things, and then there were these three lumberjacks, but only one of them talked!”

The shot parodied a Dallas episode where a key character was killed, then reanimated when it was revealed that the death occurred in a dream.

Two subsequent series were comparative duds: Bobin 1992-93, and Georges and Leo1997-98. Although he was nominated several times, he never won an Emmy for his work on sitcoms. “I guess they think I’m not acting. That it’s just Bob being Bob,” he sighs.

Over the years, Newhart has also appeared in several films, usually in comedic roles. Among them: Catch 22, Inside and outside, Legally Blonde 2 And Elfas the diminutive father of his adopted son Will Ferrell. His more recent works include Horrible bosses and the TV series The Librarians, The Big Bang Theory And Young Sheldon.

Newhart married Virginia Quinn, known to his friends as Ginny, in 1964, and remained with her until her death in 2023. They had four children: Robert, Timothy, Jennifer, and Courtney. Newhart was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson and enjoyed teasing the three-times divorcee This evening He said some comedians had long-term marriages. He was particularly close to Don Rickles, another comedian and family man, whose raucous, insulting humor contrasted memorably with Newhart’s droll understatement.

“We’re like apples and oranges. I’m Jewish, he’s Catholic. He’s quiet, I’m a screamer,” Rickles told Variety in 2012. A decade later, Judd Apatow would pay tribute to their friendship in the documentary short Bob and Don: A Love Story.

A master of the sarcastic remark, Newhart got into comedy after growing tired of his $5-an-hour accounting job in Chicago. To pass the time, he and a friend, Ed Gallagher, began making witty phone calls. They eventually decided to record them as comedy sketches and sell them to radio stations.

Their efforts failed, but the records caught the attention of Warner Bros., who signed Newhart to a recording contract and booked him into a Houston club in February 1960.

“A terrified 30-year-old man went on stage and played in a nightclub for the first time,” he recalled in 2003.

Six of his routines were recorded during his two-week appointments, and the album, The Buttoned Mind of Bob Newhartwas released on April 1, 1960. It sold 750,000 copies and was followed by The buttoned-up mind strikes back! At one point, the albums reached No. 1 and No. 2 on the sales charts. The New York Times declared in 1960 that he was “the first comedian in history to become famous through a recording.”

In addition to winning the Grammy for Album of the Year for his debut, Newhart won the Grammy for Best New Artist of 1960, and the following The buttoned-up mind strikes back! won the award for best spoken comedy album.

Newhart has been scheduled for several appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and in nightclubs, concert halls and college campuses across the country. He hated those clubs, though, because of the drunks who rowdy them up.

“Every time I have to go out of a scene and put one of those birds in its place, it kills the routine,” he said in 1960.

In 2004, he received another Emmy nomination, this time for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series, for a role in ER Another honor came in 2007, when the Library of Congress announced that it had added The Buttoned Mind of Bob Newhart to its registry of historically significant sound recordings. Only 25 recordings are added each year to the registry, which was created in 2000.

Newhart hit bestseller lists in 2006 with his memoir, I shouldn’t even be doing this! He was nominated for another Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album (a category that includes audiobooks) for his reading of the book.

“I have always compared what I do to the man who is convinced he is the last sane man on earth… the Paul Revere of psychotics who runs around town and shouts, ‘This is crazy.’ But no one pays any attention to him,” Newhart wrote.

Born George Robert Newhart in Chicago to a German-Irish family, he was named Bob to avoid confusion with his father, who was also named George.

At St. Ignatius High School and Loyola University Chicago, he amused his classmates with impersonations of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Durante and other stars. After earning a business degree, Newhart served two years in the Army. Returning to Chicago after his service, he enrolled in Loyola Law School but failed. He eventually landed a job as an accountant with the state Department of Employment. Bored with the work, he spent his free time acting in a theater company in suburban Oak Park, an experience that led to the telephone songs.

“I wasn’t part of a comedy cabal,” Newhart wrote in his memoir. “Mike (Nichols) and Elaine (May), Shelley (Berman), Lenny Bruce, Johnny Winters, Mort Sahl—we didn’t all get together and say, ‘Let’s change the comedy and slow it down.’ It was just our way of finding humor. Students would hear jokes about mothers-in-law and say, ‘What’s a mother-in-law?’ What we were doing reflected our lives and was connected to theirs.”

Newhart continued to appear occasionally on television after his fourth sitcom ended and vowed in 2003 that he would work as long as he could.

“It’s been so long, 43 years of my life; (stopping) would be like missing something,” he said.