Bob Newhart, who has died aged 94, employed a deadpan delivery, marked with a sometimes stammering hesitation, that made him an unlikely candidate to become one of America’s most successful comedians. It was in keeping with his character that his successes often went overlooked.
Newhart burst on to the scene with the 1960 release of The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, a recording of his first-ever standup performance just months earlier. It shot to No 1 on record charts, followed six months later by The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!, which rose to No 2, behind its predecessor. His debut won the 1961 Grammy as album of the year, the sequel won best spoken comedy album, and Newhart was named best new recording artist.
Newhart’s preferred format was the one-sided telephone conversation, where the audience’s understanding of what the speaker cannot see makes Newhart his own straight-man. Abraham Lincoln’s PR man in Washington tries to stop him from changing the Gettysburg Address (“You changed four score and seven to 87? Abe, that’s a grabber!”). An official of the West India Company listens to Walter Raleigh singing the praises of the 80 tonnes of leaves he’s shipping to London (“Then what do you do, Walt? You set fire to it! You inhale the smoke, huh! You know, Walt … it seems you can stand in front of your fireplace and have the same thing going for you!”).
In 1961, Newhart made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York, appeared in Don Siegel’s war film Hell Is for Heroes (doing a variation of his routine on a walkie-talkie) and starred in his first TV series, The Bob Newhart Show, a variety and comedy sketch show following Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall on NBC. Though it lasted only one season, it won an Emmy and a Peabody award.
The key to Newhart’s immediate success was suggested by his “button-down” persona. This was the beginning of President John Kennedy’s “new frontier”, where what the British fashion critic John Taylor demeaned as the “simulated negligence” of the unpadded grey flannel suit signified a certain comfort and style, as well as sober conformity. Newhart’s probing of the accepted everyday was entertaining but sharp; a form of subtle satire.
It was a casual approach that he had refined carefully. Born George Robert in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Newhart grew up called “Bob” to distinguish him from his father, George David, who was part-owner of a plumbing and heating business. His mother, Pauline (nee Burns), was a housewife. He attended Catholic schools, and graduated from Loyola University in Chicago with a degree in business management in 1952. After two years in the army working as a clerk, he entered the law school at Loyola, but soon left and began working as an accountant.
In one job, he and a colleague, Ed Gallagher, began recording dialogues in the style of Bob and Ray, an innovative comedy duo. Gallagher left for New York, and Newhart moved to writing ad copy for a Chicago production company, while circulating his own tapes.
Local radio personality Dan Sorkin played some, and Newhart began appearing on local morning TV. Tapes reached the record producer George Avakian, who in 1958 had left Columbia Records to form an equivalent company for Warner Brothers. Avakian wanted to catch Newhart’s standup act immediately; the February 1960 show at the Tidelands Club in Houston – which became his first record – was at the first venue that Newhart’s quickly acquired agent could find to book.
After the success of The Bob Newhart Show, he was immediately busy on the standup circuit. His intelligence and easy-going demeanour made him a popular guest on other talkshows, and eventually he was a regular replacement for Johnny Carson on Tonight. Although he was accused by the comic Shelley Berman of plagiarising the telephone gimmick from him, it had already been a longstanding format used by performers including George Jessel and Arlene Harris. It was his demeanour, knowing but hesitant (which he sometimes said was influenced by George Gobel), that made him such a versatile performer.
The comic Buddy Hackett introduced Newhart to Ginnie (Virginia) Quinn, the daughter of the character actor Bill Quinn. They married in 1963, and the enduring alliance became a running joke when he appeared with the thrice-wed Carson.
Newhart’s film roles were infrequent but often telling: as Major Major in Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1970); as Gene Wilder’s pal in the Odd Couple-like TV movie Thursday’s Game (1974); and as Papa Elf alongside Will Ferrell in Elf (2003). He also did voices, notably the rescue mouse Bernard in The Rescuers (1977) and its sequel, The Rescuers Down Under (1990).
Unusually, he starred in two long-running TV series. In The Bob Newhart Show (1972-78) he played a psychologist: the perfect manifestation of his standup routine’s listening and commenting. It grew from an appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and was produced by Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker’s MTM Productions. With Suzanne Pleshette as his schoolteacher wife and Peter Bonerz as the dentist with whom he shares an office, the show was an immediate hit. As ratings dropped and Newhart tired of it, he at one point refused a script that introduced children. “It’s very funny,” he told the producers. “Who’s going to play Bob?”
He returned in 1982 with Newhart, playing Dick Loudon, a writer who moves with his wife (Mary Frann) to a rural Vermont inn. With a cast including Tom Poston, who would win three Emmy nominations as the eccentric handyman George, Newhart became the centre of a world whose chaos stretched the kind of calm understanding for which he was known.
In 1985, Newhart was diagnosed with a blood disease, polycythemia, caused by smoking. Having made comedy from tobacco and appeared, with Poston, in Norman Lear’s comedy Cold Turkey (1971), where a town tries to win $25m from a tobacco company by quitting smoking for a month, he now quit himself.
As Newhart drew to a close after eight seasons, a classic final episode, which played off the famous “who shot JR?” finale of Dallas. It was kept top secret by the cast and crew. Struck by a golf ball, Newhart wakes up in the Bob Newhart Show bedroom, next to Pleshette, complaining of a crazy dream he’s had about Vermont.
Two more series were less successful. Bob (1992-93) saw him as a cartoonist trying to adjust to a corporate world when a character he created is revived. George and Leo (1997-98) was another Odd Couple-type scenario, in which his bookstore owner shares a flat with his son’s father-in-law (Judd Hirsch), who’s running from the mob. Newhart joked about the title: “We had used every variation of my name; all that was left was ‘The’.”
Newhart’s three-part guest appearance on ER in 2003, where Sherry Stringfield’s Dr Lewis helps Newhart’s suicidal Ben Hollander adjust to his oncoming blindness, earned him his fifth Emmy nomination. He was nominated again in 2009 for a supporting role in The Librarian, but finally won in 2013, playing Arthur Jeffries in the comedy The Big Bang Theory. Jeffries was Professor Proton, host of the science TV series (based on Watch Mr Wizard) watched by the genius Sheldon. He was nominated twice more, and reprised the role three times in Young Sheldon.
Newhart’s lifelong comedic chalk-and-cheese friendship with Don Rickles was the subject of Bob and Don: A Love Story, a short documentary made in 2022 by Judd Apatow.
Ginny died in 2023, and Newhart is survived by his sons, Robert and Timothy, and daughters, Courtney and Jennifer.
• Bob (George Robert) Newhart, comedian and actor, born 5 September 1929; died 18 July 2024
