Bob Newhart, who went from standup comedy to sitcom star, dies at 94
Bob Newhart was still living with his parents when he was 30. He was a balding, slouch-eyed former accountant who talked in a calculated, halting stammer. He was no one’s idea of a superstar.
Yet, within a year, his understated comedy routines that emphasized the absurdities of ordinary life made him a national sensation. Newhart, who died Thursday at 94, became the first comedian with a No. 1 record and the star of two long-running sitcoms. Regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern comedy, he helped shape the humor of Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld, among others.
His debut album, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” soared past the pop and rock recordings of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley to stand at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for 14 weeks in 1960. It was first comedy album to sell more than 1 million copies, and Newhart remains the only comedian to win Grammy Awards for best new artist and album of the year.
He didn’t emerge from the traditional proving ground of nightclubs but relied on recordings to propel his popularity. In fact, the first time he performed in a nightclub was when he recorded “The Button-Down Mind,” which sold more than 100 million copies.
Newhart’s best-selling records helped him become one of the first comedians to develop a following on college campuses. With his suit and tie and his subdued manner, he looked like a junior executive who wandered across the hall from a business meeting to describe a world wobbling off its axis.
“Comedy is a way to bring logic to an illogical situation, of which there are many in everyday life,” Newhart wrote in a 2006 memoir, “I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This!” “I’ve always likened what I do to the man who is convinced that he is the last sane man on Earth.”
His deadpan, profanity-free “clean” approach stood out from a growing trend of confrontational, political and overcaffeinated comedians of the time, including Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Don Rickles – who became Newhart’s closest friend.
Newhart’s staid “button-down” style was largely dependent on his uninflected delivery, carefully placed pauses and stutters. He often introduced his sketches as observations about the business world, workplace conventions and the frustrations of quotidian life.
“The comedy was intelligent,” comedian Tommy Smothers told the Chicago Tribune in 2002, the year Newhart was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center. “And Bob had that wonderful sense of space – that timing that was so essential to the comedy. He never really told hard jokes. It was attitude and inflection – and the space when you picked those words up. That was his great gift.”
By looking at familiar situations from fresh angles, Newhart uncovered an original brand of humor: He portrayed a driving instructor with a clueless student; the beleaguered commander of a nuclear submarine, the USS Codfish, with a mutinous crew; and a bus-driving teacher who schools his students on the proper way to leave passengers at the curb: “What you want to do is just kind of gradually ease out. You’re kind of always holding out the hope they can catch up with the bus, you know what I mean? … Did you see how he slammed the door right in her face that time? That’s called your perfect pullout.”
One of Newhart’s major contributions to comedy was to deliver essentially a “straight-man” routine, with the audience hearing only one side of an increasingly desperate side of a conversation, often in the form of a phone call.
“Listen, Abe,” he imagined a press agent telling President Abraham Lincoln, “what’s the problem? You’re thinking of shaving it off? Uh, Abe, don’t you see, that’s part of the image?”
In one of his most popular skits, built around the idea of introducing new products that don’t have an obvious market niche, Newhart imagined a telephone call to the London home office of the East India Company from Sir Walter Raleigh, reporting on a new purchase in the American colonies.
“What’s tobacco, Walt? … Let me get this straight now, Walt, you bought 80 tons of leaves? This, uh, may come as kind of a surprise to you, Walt, but come fall in England here, we’re kind of up to our – It isn’t that kind of leaf, huh?”
Another routine was built on the idea of workplace emergencies not covered during employee orientation. In this case, a security guard in his first night on the job at the Empire State Building isn’t sure what to do when King Kong begins to climb the outside of the building.
“See, something’s come up, sir,” the guard hesitantly tells his boss on the telephone, “and it’s not covered in the guards’ manual. I looked in the index, yes, sir. I looked under unauthorized personnel and people without passes and apes and apes’ toes. Apes and apes’ toes, yes, sir … See, this isn’t your standard ape, sir. He’s between 18 and 19 stories high, depending on whether there is a 13th floor or not.”
After years as a stand-up star and frequent appearances on TV variety shows, Newhart found that his unassuming stage persona as a slightly bewildered everyman translated comfortably to the television situation comedy.
“The Bob Newhart Show,” which ran on CBS from 1972 to 1978, was part of a formidable CBS Saturday comedy lineup, along with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “All in the Family” and “The Carol Burnett Show.” Newhart played a Chicago psychologist coping with the comic foibles of his clients.
His wife on the show was played by throaty-voiced actress Suzanne Pleshette. Newhart insisted that the couple be childless.
“I didn’t want to do a certain kind of show, which was the dumb father who keeps getting in these pickles and these precocious children and mother get him out of it,” he told the Newark Star-Ledger in 2001. “That was one of the few conditions that I insisted on, and I think it was one of the factors that made the show work.”
On “Newhart,” which ran on CBS from 1982 to 1990, he portrayed a guidebook-writer-turned-Vermont-innkeeper dealing with a cast of eccentric locals. The final episode became one of the most memorable in television history.
After being knocked unconscious by an errant golf ball, Newhart awakes alongside Pleshette in the bed of their Chicago bedroom, last seen 12 years earlier on “The Bob Newhart Show.”
“Honey, wake up,” Newhart says, “you won’t believe the dream I just had.”
“All right, Bob,” says Pleshette, as the live audience gasps and applauds in recognition. “What is it?”
“I was an innkeeper,” Newhart explains, “in this crazy little town in Vermont.”
‘I’ve never played a nightclub’
George Robert Newhart was born Sept. 5, 1929, in Oak Park, Ill., and grew up in nearby Chicago. His father had a plumbing and heating business.
Newhart graduated from Chicago’s Loyola University in 1952, then spent two years in the Army. He enrolled in law school but flunked out, in part because he was devoting his evenings to amateur theater productions and early efforts at comedy. He held jobs in accounting and advertising as well as a stint with the Illinois state unemployment agency.
“I was being paid $60 a week while the people I was giving money to were getting $55,” he later said. “And they only had to come into the office once a week.”
He admired the dry, low-key comedy of such earlier stars as Jack Benny, Fred Allen and the team of Bob and Ray (Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding). While working office jobs, Newhart improvised comic telephone conversations with a friend, Ed Gallagher, then began to write and record formal comedy skits.
Some were played on a Chicago radio station, and after Gallagher moved away, Newhart continued as a solo performer. (Comedian Shelley Berman later accused Newhart of stealing his act, but the phone call has been a comedy staple almost since the time of Alexander Graham Bell.)
Newhart found a short-lived spot on a morning TV show, but he was still living with his parents and holding a series of short-term jobs when a Chicago radio DJ recommended him to Warner Bros. Records.
The label signed him to a contract and wanted to record him at a nightclub performance.
“And I said, well, see that’s going to be a problem,” Newhart told NPR in 2006, “because I’ve never played a nightclub before.”
Those first appearances, at a club in Houston, became “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” The title was a wry nod toward Newhart’s clean-cut, businesslike image.
The album’s unexpected success transformed Newhart into a major star. He appeared on TV variety shows and at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
In 1961, he was named host of his first network TV show, which won critical praise but was canceled after one season. “It got an Emmy, a Peabody, and a pink slip from NBC – all in the same year,” Newhart quipped.
In addition to the success of his two major sitcoms, Newhart occasionally appeared as a character actor in films, including the Steve McQueen war movie “Hell Is for Heroes,” in 1962. He played the eccentric Maj. Major Major, in the 1970 film “Catch-22,” based on Joseph Heller’s classic antiwar novel.
He starred in two short-lived TV comedies in the 1990s, “Bob” and “George & Leo,” and played Papa Elf opposite Will Ferrell in the 2003 holiday hit “Elf.” He had recurring roles on the TV dramas “Desperate Housewives” and “ER” and won his first Emmy Award in 2013 for a guest appearance as Professor Proton, an aging TV science host, on the CBS hit comedy “The Big Bang Theory.”
Newhart’s death, at his home in Los Angeles, was confirmed by his publicist Jerry Digney, who did not cite a cause. Information on survivors was not immediately available. His wife, the former Virginia Quinn, died in 2023 after 60 years of marriage. They had four children.
Newhart, who continued to make appearances as a stand-up comedian well into his 80s, made dozens of appearances on “The Tonight Show,” including as a frequent guest host for Johnny Carson. In 1992, Newhart was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” was named to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry of historically significant recordings in 2006.
Among all his honors, Newhart said he was especially proud to receive the Mark Twain Prize for humor because the first person to win the award was Richard Pryor, a fellow Illinoisan. Several years earlier, an ailing Pryor told Newhart he had stolen a copy of “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.”
Newhart thought Pryor meant he had stolen part of a routine. No, Pryor said: “I stole your record – from a record store in Peoria, Illinois.”
“Richard, I used to get a quarter an album” in royalties, Newhart told him. “He turned and said, ‘Somebody, give me a quarter!’ “
Pryor handed Newhart the quarter, as if repaying a debt.