Bob Newhart, Groundbreaking Stand-Up Comic and TV Sitcom Legend, Dead at 94

Bob Newhart, the comedian and actor whose deadpan manner and laconic approach led to a series of bestselling comedy albums and starring roles in two long-running sitcoms, died Thursday at the age of 94.

Newhart’s longtime publicist Jerry Digney confirmed the TV icon’s death in a statement, adding that Newhart died at his home in Los Angeles after “a series of short illnesses.”

Understated in his delivery and physically small of stature — he looked like the former accountant that he was — Newhart nonetheless left a sizable footprint on comedy. His first album, 1960’s The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, was a blockbuster; featuring his trademark one-sided conversations, the album won multiple Grammys including Album of the Year and achieved the commercial success of a huge pop album. One critic at the time described him as “a 20th-century Mark Twain in Brooks Brothers clothes.”

Newhart parlayed that success into television, starring in two hugely popular sitcoms, The Bob Newhart Show in the Seventies and Newhart the following decade. The former series, which cast Newhart as a psychologist, gingerly addressed issues like mental illness and the emerging gay-rights movement. In his later years, Newhart became known to younger generations for his roles in Elf and The Big Bang Theory.

“Newhart was the happiest set in town,” actress Julia Duffy, who worked with Newhart for seven years on the show, said in a statement. “Rehearsals were wild, as every idea, every joke, had to be tried. The joke was king; that’s what I learned from Bob above all. He teased me constantly, which I loved, while supporting me absolutely. We all knew how lucky we were. He lived and breathed comedy and his search for perfection never ceased.”

Born George Robert Newhart on Sept. 5, 1929, Newhart grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park; his father worked in plumbing supplies. After graduating from Loyola University in 1952, he was drafted into the Army and served as a clerk during the Korean War. After his tour of duty, he studied law at Loyola but, finding it dull, took a job in accounting.

Bored with that job as well, Newhart and a colleague began fooling around with fictional phone conversations. “Around 3:30, 4 o’clock, I would become … depressed,” Newhart said in 2012. “To break up the monotony of accounting, which I wasn’t very good at to begin with, I would call Ed and … we would improvise over the phone. I called him one time, and I said, ‘Mr. Smithers? Yeah, this is Bob at the yeast factory, and we have a fire here, sir. The fire company, they’re pouring water on it.… Mr. Smithers, I’m gonna have to run up to the second floor.’”

A local disc jockey and friend of Newhart’s heard the spoofs and told a friend at Warner Bros. Records, then searching for stand-up comics at a time when Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory, among others, were reinventing the form. Newhart made rough tapes of the skits — which had developed into satirical phone calls in which the audience would only hear Newhart’s part of the conversation — and was soon signed by the label.

Some of his most popular bits — marketing executives advising Abraham Lincoln, the Wright Brothers and a harried driving instructor — were included on The Button-Down Mind. (“What’s the problem?” Lincoln’s publicist is overheard saying to him before the Gettysburg Address. “…You’re thinking of shaving it off?… Um, Abe, don’t you see that’s part of the image?”)

Those and other bits captured life in America after World War II and before Vietnam: a new world of marketing, suburban comfort, and airline travel, but with a twist. “The Uncle Freddie Show,” in which Newhart played a cranky host, spoofed the new world of children’s TV; in “Ledge Psychology,” he was the voice of a cop trying to talk someone out of jumping off a roof. In another, he plays a shrink talking with Ben Franklin about his dreams (“You’re walking down the street and you find a half dollar and your face is on it — that’s pretty sick, you know that, Ben”).

Despite the modest edginess of some of his topics, Newhart delivered those skits in a low-key manner, dotted with his occasional stammer. “Something very sick makes me laugh,” he said in 2019. “My wife says to me, ‘If people ever found out what you find humorous, they’d stop showing up.’ I said to her, ‘That’s our little secret.’”

Thanks to the LP format, which was able to showcase comedians more than ever before, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart caught fire. It was the Number One album in the country for an astounding 14 weeks and led to Newhart winning three Grammys in 1961: Album of the Year (over Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole, among others), Best New Artist. Released six months later, his second album, The Button Down Mind Strikes Back!, won a Grammy that year for Best Comedy Performance Spoken Word.

At one point, those two albums were Number One and Two on the pop charts — a feat that wouldn’t be repeated again until Guns N’ Roses’ separate Use Your Illusion sets took over the top two album spots in 1991. “All of a sudden, I was thrust into the limelight, totally unprepared for what was happening,” Newhart said later. “I never expected that the album would be as well received as it was. It was New Year’s every night. All of the sudden, I’m getting calls and my manager Frank Hogan in Chicago said, ‘You wanna do six or eight Ed Sullivan’s?’”

Moving into television, Newhart hit a speed bump. He starred in a 1961 series, The Bob Newhart Variety Show, but it was canceled after one season despite scoring an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Comedy. In spite of that setback, Newhart became a regular on TV variety shows throughout the Sixties, and Mike Nichols cast him as Major Major in the film version of Catch-22 in 1969.

Soon after, Newhart was approached by Mary Tyler Moore and her husband and co-producer, Grant Tinker, about starring in a new sitcom for their MTM Productions. Debuting on CBS in 1972, and broadcast right after The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show featured Newhart as psychologist Bob Hartley.

The series didn’t push the controversy button as much as other contemporaneous sitcoms like All in the Family and Maude. But it took any number of its own risks, starting with Hartley and his wife, Emily (played by Suzanne Pleshette), as a childless older couple. “I love kids,” he said at the time. “I have four of my own, but I didn’t want to be the dumb father that seemed to be in every sitcom. I said that wasn’t the kind of show I wanted to do. And that was one of the more unusual things about the show.”

Other unusual aspects included the Hartleys sharing the same bed (a first for network television), Hartley’s psychologically damaged patients, and an episode in which a recurring character played by Howard Hesseman (later of WKRP in Cincinnati) came out as gay — groundbreaking for network television in the Seventies.

After seven seasons, Newhart was “burnt out”; shutting the series down, he made the move into films. In 1980, he starred in First Family, playing the president of the United States alongside a cast that included Gilda Radner and Fred Willard. Although it was directed and written by Buck Henry, it fizzled. “That should have been good,” Newhart said later, “but somehow wasn’t.”

In 1982, Newhart was persuaded to return to sitcoms with Newhart. Again sticking to his role as a somewhat regular guy trying to make sense of an offbeat situation, he played Dick Loudon, an author of do-it-yourself home-repair books who opens up an inn in rural Vermont. In a rare example of a second act in television, Newhart was also a hit — the only new CBS series of the 1982-83 season to be brought back for another year. “Bob’s strength is being the voice of reason,” one of the show’s executive producers said at the time, “and in the way he reacts when everything else is out of control.”

The show continued until 1990. In its eye-popping last scene, Dick Loudon wakes up one morning and finds himself next to Emily (Pleshette, reprising her role from the previous series), as if the entire Newhart series was merely a dream. “Some people felt cheated,” Newhart said later. “They devoted eight years of their life, and it turns out none of them existed.”

In the Nineties, Newhart tried his hand at two more sitcoms: Bob (co-starring a pre-Friends Lisa Kudrow) and George & Leo (also starring Judd Hirsch). Both were canceled soon into their runs, but Newhart kept working. He appeared on episodes of ER and spoke at Krusty the Klown’s funeral on The Simpsons.

The latter was one of the first signs that Newhart’s appeal could transcend generations. He gained a new legion of fans after appearing as Will Ferrell’s tiny North Pole dad in Elf, and he guest-starred in several episodes of The Big Bang Theory as Professor Proton, the host of Leonard and Sheldon’s childhood-favorite TV science show. Those appearances led to Newhart finally winning an Emmy in 2013 (for “Outstanding Guest Actor”) after seven previous nominations.

In addition to the way he made the comedy LP a household staple and tweaked sitcom conventions, Newhart left behind other legacies. Characters on The Bob Newhart Show said “Hi, Bob!” so often that it became a drinking game. “I just hope they play the game in the frat house and don’t drive,” he said in 2003. “I don’t want to be responsible.” In 2004, a bronze statue of Newhart was unveiled in Chicago, near the office building used in the opening credits of The Bob Newhart Show.

”What I’m actually hoping is there’s the Pearly Gates and God’s there and he says to me, ‘What did you do in life?’” Newhart said in 2019. “And I say, ‘I was a stand-up comedian.’ And he says, ‘Get in that real short line over there.’ God has an incredible sense of humor, an unimaginable sense of humor. Just look around.”

From Rolling Stone US.