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Louise Thomas
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Bob Newhart has died at the age of 94 in Los Angeles. The comedy icon’s publicist Jerry Digney said he died after a series of short illnesses. Tributes for the late star have poured in from across the entertainment industry.
Newhart spent six decades making America laugh. He began his long and storied career with a wildly influential stand-up record in 1960, starred in a pair of long-running and much-loved sitcoms through the 1970s and 1980s and continued to win over new fans with appearances in films such as Elf and a recurring role as Professor Proton on The Big Bang Theory. Through all that time he maintained a reputation for clean, deadpan humor delivered in a soft-spoken stammer. Before filming the pilot episode of The Bob Newhart Show in 1972, producers suggested he try to deliver his lines more smoothly. He replied: “This stammer got me a home in Beverly Hills.”
Newhart’s introduction into the world of comedy was far from conventional, and he would later say that his contented childhood gave him little to rebel against. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois on September 5, 1929, to parents George, who owned part of a plumbing business, and Julia, a housewife. He attended Roman Catholic schools before graduating from Loyola University in Chicago with a degree in business management. After a spell drafted into the US Army he found work as an accountant and then an advertising copywriter. It was there, in the late 1950s, that Newhart made his first comedy recordings, absurd scenarios that he dreamed up with a co-worker and then attempted (unsuccessfully) to sell to radio stations.
These recordings did, however, find their way from a local DJ to the new president of Warner Bros Records, who decided to offer Newhart a deal to record a live stand-up special. The only trouble was that Newhart had never performed live stand-up. He made his debut at the Tidelands Club in Houston, Texas in February 1960. Two weeks later, on the same stage, he recorded The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. It was an instant phenomenon.
The album’s opening track, “Abe Lincoln vs Madison Avenue”, set the tone for Newhart’s pioneering brand of humor. He would often deliver monologues in the form of one-sided telephone conversations, allowing the listener to imagine, in this case, the other side of a call between Abraham Lincoln and the advertising exec charged with convincing him not to change “four score and seven” to “87” in the Gettysburg Address: “Abe, that’s meant to be a grabber.”
It sounded like no other comic around, and became the first ever comedy album to top the Billboard pop charts. At the following year’s Grammys it won Album of the Year and Newhart picked up Best New Artist, the only time a comedian has ever won that award. The record has continued to resonate through popular culture ever since: Pete Campbell listens to it in the first season of Mad Men, while Joel Maisel butchers the Abe Lincoln routine in the pilot episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
When Newhart landed his own sitcom in 1972, The Bob Newhart Show, the writers made use of his comic delivery by starting most episodes with him on the phone to an unheard interlocutor. These conversations would build to a comic frenzy where it seemed the person on the other end must be cursing him out, to which Newhart always angrily replied: “Same to you, fella!” The show, which saw Newhart play a psychologist, was a ratings success and ran for six years until 1978. After a four year break, Newhart returned with another sitcom, Newhart, in which he played a Vermont innkeeper. It ran for eight years until a memorable finale in 1990 which saw Newhart wake up as his character from the original Bob Newhart Show and realize that the entire show had been a dream.
In the years following his two acclaimed sitcom stints, Newhart continued to work as a character actor in films and television. He delivered a eulogy for Krusty the Clown in a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, played the doting Papa Elf in Will Ferrell’s 2003 festive comedy Elf and cameoed as a sadistic CEO in 2011’s Horrible Bosses. From 2013 onwards he made a series of appearances in The Big Bang Theory, and later Young Sheldon, playing Professor Proton, a TV show host turned children’s party entertainer who is beloved by the main characters.
He won his first and only Emmy in 2013 for that role, and returned to the Emmys stage at the age of 90 in 2019 to appear in a lineup of television legends alongside waxworks of George Burns and Lucille Ball. After Ben Stiller paid tribute to Newhart’s “wholesome genius” and wondered what he’d make of modern comedy, Newhart interjected in that familiar stammering tone: “Ben, I’m still alive.” That same year, he told The New York Times that he believed he knew what was “on the other side” after we die, and that he hoped it would be a pleasant experience for comedians. “God has an incredible sense of humor, an unimaginable sense of humor,” he said. “Just look around.”
Newhart’s wife Ginnie died last year. He is survived by his children, Robert Jr, Timothy, Courtney and Jennifer, and 10 grandchildren.
