The year was 1961. The Grammys were still in their infancy. The crown jewel of the ceremony? Naturally, the prize for Album of the Year. In the category: Nice ‘n’ Easy, an album by Frank Sinatra, who won the award the previous year, and recordings by Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte, a pair of singers at the top of their game. Yet the winner was a 32-year-old comic from just outside Chicago, whose album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, reached number one on the Billboard charts and influenced an entire generation of comics. And so began one of the great careers in comedy, and indeed in all of show business.
Bob Newhart died on July 18, 2024 at the age of 94, a year after his wife of 60 years, Ginny, and seven years after the man he often referred to as his best friend, Don Rickles. The Newharts and the Rickles often vacationed with one another, as depicted in Judd Apatow’s recent documentary about the pair and their relationship. “Don is my best friend,” Newhart said at the Dean Martin-hosted roast of Rickles in 1974, “which just gives you some idea the difficulty I have in making friends.”
One of the great jokes between the two friends was their vastly different levels of success on television. Whereas Rickles constantly had his programs canceled, Newhart starred in two of the most influential sitcoms of the 1970s and 80s. First was The Bob Newhart Show, in which he played the Chicago psychologist Robert Harley for 142 episodes. “I’m a listener and I react to what people say,” he once said of the show. “We needed a profession that suited that.”
Then came Newhart. From 1982 to 1990, he starred as a writer-turned-innkeeper by the name of Dick Loudon. The series features one of the most memorable show endings in history. Newhart (spoiler warning) goes to bed as his character in Newhart, but wakes up as Harley, in bed with Suzanne Pleshette, who played his wife, Emily, on The Bob Newhart Show. He shares that he has just had a dream about being an innkeeper in Vermont, etc.
This kind of dry, cerebral humor defined Newhart throughout his career. “Bob Newhart taught countless generations of comedians that you could be funny, smart, uncompromising, and still win on your own terms,” Conan O’Brien wrote. Newhart won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2002.
Born on September 5, 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois, Newhart came to embody middle class America. His father worked in the plumbing business. After college, he went off to serve in the Korean War before working as an accountant. Then he moved on to a job in advertising. While working as a copywriter, he and a colleague would entertain each other by acting out fake phone conversations. Eventually, recordings of the calls were sent to radio stations. From there, it was off to Warner Bros., and then stardom.
His first album bears traces of his time in advertising. It begins with a bit about a Madison Avenue adman advising Abraham Lincoln just before the Gettysburg Address. “You changed ‘Four score and seven’ to 87,” the man asks incredulously. “Abe, that’s meant to be a grabber. Abe, we test-marketed that … and they went out of their minds about it.” The album also won him the Best New Artist Grammy.
Newhart went on to record seven more live albums, including one that very same year, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!, which earned him a third Grammy. Considered one of the greatest stand-ups to ever perform, the influence of his deadpan style could be felt in generations of comics. On an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, George Wallace and Jerry Seinfeld remember stopping in Las Vegas to see Newhart en route to Los Angeles. He told a joke that stayed with them for decades: a pair of airline pilots crash into the side of the airport. One notes the short length of the runway. To which the other responds, “But it was wide though.” Such deceptively simple punchlines, delivered with impeccable timing and a cadence often described as “stammering,” made him a singular presence on stage.
A modest movie career began in 1962 with Hell Is for Heroes, a World War II film directed by Don Siegel. Newhart plays a private who, naturally, is asked to broadcast misleading radio messages. He appears opposite the likes of Steve McQueen, James Coburn, and Bobby Darin. In 2003, he delivered perhaps his best known movie performance, playing the Papa Elf to Will Ferrell’s Buddy in Elf.
Beyond the sitcom success (and a few short-lived ones too), Newhart became a staple on the variety and late night television show circuit. He often filled in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. One classic moment came with Rickles as a guest. As the two bantered, Rickles began banging Carson’s cigarette box on the desk and broke it, leading to Carson’s revenge the next night. Newhart was equally gifted as a guest, one of the few comics who could joke with Carson as equals. “You have my admiration,” he once said to Carson while reflecting on the tiring work of a host. “But I’m not going to bore people with that.”
Despite his consummate work on television for decades, Newhart did not win an Emmy award until 2013. He guest starred in six episodes of The Big Bang Theory, winning for his work as Arthur Jeffries / Professor Proton. When Jim Parson and he later presented an award, the crowd rose to its feet and began applauding before Newhart could even say a word. There could be no finer testament—and a well-deserved one—to his greatness.
Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic and researcher, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.
