Bob Newhart, the beloved stand-up performer whose corny, deadpan humor featured on two CBS sitcoms catapulted him into the ranks of the greatest comedians of all time, died Thursday morning. It was 94.
The Chicago legend, who won Grammy Awards for album of the Year and Best New Artist for his breakthrough 1960 record The Button-Down Mind by Bob Newhartdied at his home in Los Angeles after a series of brief illnesses, his longtime publicist, Jerry Digneywas announced.
The former accountant went without an Emmy until 2013, when he was finally given a guest-starring role as Arthur Jeffries (aka Professor Proton, former host of a children's science show) on CBS' The theory of the Big Bang.
In 1972, MTM Enterprises cast the mediocre comic as clinical psychologist Bob Hartley, who interned at Newhart's real-life favorite burger joint in Chicago. The Bob Newhart Show it would become one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, with a great cast of supporting players: Suzanne Pleshette, Peter Bonerz, Marcia Wallace, Bill Daily and Jack Riley among them.
Newhart ended the series in 1978 after 142 episodes—and, incredibly, no Emmy nominations for him and no wins for the show—feeling he'd run out of tricks. But he returned to CBS in 1982 to tackle another MTM comedy.
In Newhart, he played Dick Loudon, a writer from New York who became the owner of the Stratford Inn in Vermont. The show was a mainstay for eight seasons and it also had a great cast (Mary Frann, Tom Poston – who would later marry Pleshette – Julia Duffy, Peter Scolari and as handymen “Larry, Darryl and their other brother Darryl”, William Sanderson, Tony Papenfuss and John Voldstad).
In one of the most admirable series endings in history, Newhart concluded the eight-season run with a cheeky final scene in which Loudon wakes up in the middle of the night as Bob Hartley in bed with Pleshette in their Chicago apartment, suggesting that his entire second series was a dream.
Newhart's pauses and stutters were among his trademarks, and his wry remarks were a result of his observant nature.
“I tend to find humor in the macabre. I would say 85 percent of me is what you see on the show. And the other 15 percent is a very sick person with a very disturbed mind,” he said during a 1990 interview with Los Angeles magazine.
He was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame in 1992.
George Robert Newhart was born on September 5, 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois. He grew up a Cubs fan and attended the team's victory parade down La Salle Street after Chicago captured the National League pennant in 1945. (Of course he was thrilled when the Cubs ended their 108-year World Series drought by winning in 2016.)
Newhart never dreamed of being in show business. In fact, such a flashy profession played against the Midwestern grain of his personality and may have been the reason he would be associated with Middle America.
After attending St. Ignatius College Prep and then earned a bachelor's degree in commerce from Loyola University, Newhart spent two years in the military before dropping out of law school. He then worked as an accountant at US Gypsum and then at Glidden Co., which sold paint.
“Somehow there's a connection between numbers and music and comedy. I don't know what it is, but I know it's there,” he once said in an interview with a college business professor. “I know it's a case of 2 and 2 equals 5 from a comedian's point of view. You take this fact and you take that fact and then you end up with this ridiculous fact.”
To combat the discomfort at work, Newhart and a friend amused themselves by making prank calls. He improved them in what was then his signature comedy bit: having a one-sided phone conversation (the audience had to imagine what the other side of the conversation was like).
He and his friend also sold a syndicated radio show in which they did five-minute comedy routines five days a week for $7.50 a week.
In 1959, another friend who was a disc jockey in Chicago introduced Newhart to a Warner Bros. executive. The accountant, now a copywriter, had only three routines at the time, but found more material and signed a record deal.
“Remember, when I started out in the late fifties, I didn't say to myself, 'Oh, here's a big gap to fill – I'm going to be a bald ex-accountant who specializes in low-key humor'.” he said. “That's just who I was and that's the direction my mind always went, so it was natural for me to be that way.”
The Button-Down Mind by Bob Newhart, recorded live in a Houston nightclub, became the first comedy album to top the album charts, selling 1.5 million copies as one of the best-selling 'talk' albums. Tracks included such classics as “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” and “Driving Instructor.”
Coming at a time when controversial, harder-edged comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl were joining hands, The Button-Down Mind earned Newhart a third Grammy for Best Comedy Performance. Suddenly, he was getting booked The Ed Sullivan Show.
After two more successful albums, Newhart was offered a weekly television series for the 1961-62 season. The first The Bob Newhart Show won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy Program of the Year as well as a Peabody Award.
Newhart, however, soon found himself exhausted. “I took full responsibility for the program seven days a week, 24 hours a day, despite a good production team,” he once said.
He was offered a number of sitcoms but turned them down, returning to nightclubs and honing his acting skills with TV guest spots and film work, starting with Don Siegel. Hell is for heroes (1962), starring Steve McQueen, and then in other films such as Hot Millions (1968), Mike Nichols' Catch-22 (1970) and by Norman Lear Cold turkey (1971).
Newhart Show Co-creators Dave Davis and Lorenzo Music have wanted to work on the comic for some time.
“Lorenzo and I wrote a segment for Bob on Love American Style. Bob was unavailable. Well, we got Sid Caesar. A few years later, we did a script for Bob The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Again, Bob was unavailable,” Davis said THR in one oral history of the sitcom. “After we became story editors on Mary's show, MTM Enterprises decided to branch out and asked Lorenzo and I to do a pilot. We knew exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted a show with Bob.”
Newhart said:Arthur Price [co-founder of MTM] he was my manager. He asked me if I was interested. For 12 years I was on the road doing stand-up, mostly one-night shows where the next day you're 5,300 miles away. I wanted a normal life where I could be home with my family.
“I didn't have many demands. I just didn't want the show to be where the dad is a doll that everyone loves who gets himself into a pickle and then the wife and kids come together to get him out of it.”
In 1992, another new series started, Weight, he plays a cult comic artist, but he never found an audience. He didn't either George & Leonin which he played a bookstore owner opposite Judd Hirsch.
Newhart appeared on NBC ER for three episodes, portraying a doctor with macular degeneration (which earned him another Emmy Award) and played Morty Flickman, the husband of Lesley Ann Warren's character, on ABC Desperate Housewives.
More recently, Newhart portrayed Judson in a trio The Librarians telefilms and then a series for TNT.
Newhart also co-starred Little Miss Marker (1980); as president at Buck Henry's First Family (1980), with Gilda Radner as his crazy daughter. as Papa Elf in Will Ferrell's Elf (2003); and to Terrible bosses (2011). He brought his flat Midwestern rhythm to shout the job in two Rescuers movies.
Chicago honored Newhart with a statue on Michigan Avenue, near the office building seen in its opening credits The Bob Newhart Show, with his likeness in a chair and an empty psychiatrist's couch at his side. It was later transferred to the Navy Pier.
In 2002, he became the fifth recipient of the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Award for American Humor and four years later published his memoirs. I shouldn't even be doing this.
Newhart was married to Virginia “Ginny” Quinn (daughter of actor Bill Quinn) from January 1963 until her death in April 2023 at the age of 82. They were set up on a blind date by comedian Buddy Hackett (Ginny was at Hackett's baby-sitting. guys).
“Buddy turned around one day and said in his inimitable way, 'I met this young man and his name is Bobby Newhart, he's a comic and he's Catholic and you're Catholic and I think maybe you should marry each other.' “, she recalled in an interview in 2013.
She was the one who came up with the idea for his brilliant ending Newhart show during a Christmas party that Pleshette also happened to attend.
The Newharts were great friends with Don Rickles and his wife, Barbara, and the couple often vacationed together.
Survivors include his children, Robert Jr., Timothy, Courtney and Jennifer, and 10 grandchildren.
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
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