LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bob Newhart was an accountant turned comedian who became one of the most popular of all time. tv set The man who became one of the stars of his time with his hugely successful classic comedy albums has died aged 94.
Newhart’s publicist, Jerry Digney, said the actor died Thursday in Los Angeles after several brief bouts of illness.
New HeartThough best known now as the star of two hit TV shows that bore his name in the 1970s and 1980s, Bob Newhart began his career as a stand-up comedian in the late 1950s. He gained national fame in 1960 when his comedy was recorded for “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” which won a Grammy Award for best album of the year.
While other comedians of the time, including Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Alan King, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, often drew laughs with their aggressive attacks on modern mores, Newhart was an anomaly: His ideas were modern, but he barely raised his voice, speaking in a hesitant, almost stuttering voice, and his only prop was a telephone, which he used to pretend to be having a conversation with someone on the other end of the line.
In one memorable skit, he played a Madison Avenue image-maker urging Abraham Lincoln to stop revising the Gettysburg Address and stick to the speechwriter’s draft.
“You changed 87 to 48 and 7?” Newhart asked incredulously. “Abe, it was meant to attract attention…it’s like Mark Antony saying, ‘Friends, citizens of Rome, fellow countrymen, I have something to say to you.'”
Another favorite is “The Wright Brothers’ Commercialization,” in which he tries to convince the aviation pioneers to start an airline, but acknowledges that the distance of their first flight may be a limitation.
“Well, if we had to land every 105 feet, it would take less time to get to shore.”
FILE – Bob Newhart, center, poses with members of the cast and crew of “The Bob Newhart Show,” including, from top left, Marcia Wallace, Bill Daly, Jack Reilly, Suzanne Pleshette (front left) and Dick Martin, during TV Land’s 35th anniversary tribute to “The Bob Newhart Show” in Beverly Hills, Calif., Sept. 5, 2007. Mr. Newhart, the deadpan master of sitcoms and telephone monologues, died Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Los Angeles. He was 94 years old. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File)
Newhart was initially wary of appearing on a weekly television show, fearing that his material would be overexposed, but he accepted an attractive offer from NBC, and “The Bob Newhart Show” premiered on October 11, 1961. Despite winning an Emmy and a Peabody Award, the half-hour variety show was canceled after one season and remained the butt of Newhart’s jokes for decades to come.
In 1972, after a decade-long wait, he returned to “The Bob Newhart Show,” a situation comedy in which Newhart played a Chicago psychologist living in a penthouse with his teacher wife, Suzanne Pleshette. His neighbors and patients, especially Bill Daly as an air navigator, were an eccentric, neurotic bunch who provided a good contrast to Newhart’s deadpan commentary.
FILE – Honoree Bob Newhart is applauded during the Mark Twain Humor Prize ceremony at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Oct. 29, 2002. Newhart, the deadpan master of sitcoms and telephone monologues, died Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Los Angeles at the age of 94. (AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson, File)
The series was one of the most critically acclaimed of the 1970s and ran until 1978.
Four years later, the comedian launched another show simply called “Newhart.” This time, a successful New York writer decides to reopen a long-closed Vermont inn. Once again, Newhart was a level-headed, rational man surrounded by quirky locals. The show was also a huge hit, airing for eight seasons on CBS.
The 1990 film ended in memorable style with Newhart, playing a former Chicago psychologist waking up in Pleshette’s bed and cringing as he recounted to her the strange dreams he’d had: “I used to keep an inn in a weird little town in Vermont. … The handyman never always got the gist of things, and then we had three foresters, only one of whom ever talked!”
The stunt parodies an episode of “Dallas” in which a key character is killed and then returns to life, only to discover that his death was a dream.
His next two series were comparatively dull: “Bob” from 1992-93 and “George & Leo” from 1997-98. Though he was nominated several times, his only Emmy win was for a guest role on “The Big Bang Theory.” “I guess they think I don’t act, that I’m just Bob being Bob,” he sighed, lamenting not winning TV’s highest honor at the height of his power.
FILE – Actor and comedian Bob Newhart sits with a statue of Dr. Bob Hartley, the character he played on the comedy show “The Bob Newhart Show,” which aired from 1972 to 1978, during the unveiling of the statue in Chicago on July 27, 2004. Newhart, a deadpan master of sitcoms and telephone monologues, died Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Los Angeles. He was 94 years old. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, File)
Newhart has also appeared in several films over the years, mostly comedic roles, including Catch-22, In-N-Out, Legally Blonde 2 and, as the diminutive father to adopted son Will Ferrell, in Elf. More recent credits include Horrible Bosses and the TV series The Librarians and the Big Bang Theory spinoff Young Sheldon.
Newhart married Virginia Quinn, known to friends as Ginny, in 1964. She will die in 2023.They had four children: Robert, Timothy, Jennifer and Courtney.Newhart was a regular guest on Johnny Carson, and liked to poke fun at the thrice-divorced “Tonight” host, suggesting that at least some comedians enjoyed long-term marriages. He was especially close with fellow comedian and family man Don Rickles, whose raucous, insulting humor clashed memorably with Newhart’s droll understatement.
“We’re like two different people. I’m Jewish, he’s Catholic. He’s low-key, I’m a loudmouth,” Rickles told Variety in 2012. Ten years later, Judd Apatow paid tribute to their friendship in the short documentary Bob & Don: A Love Story.
A master of the gently sarcastic remark, Newhart got into comedy after getting bored with his $5-an-hour accounting job in Chicago. To kill time, he and his friend Ed Gallagher started making funny phone calls to each other. Eventually, they decided to record them as sitcoms and sell them to radio stations.
Although their efforts were unsuccessful, the record caught the eye of Warner Brothers, who signed Newhart to a record contract and invited him to play clubs in Houston in February 1960.
“I was a terrified 30-year-old guy walking out on stage, playing in a nightclub for the first time,” he recalled in 2003.
Six of his routines were recorded during the two-week run, and the album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, was released on April Fool’s Day, 1960. The album sold 750,000 copies and was followed by The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!, which briefly reached numbers one and two on the sales charts. In 1960, The New York Times described him as “the first comedian in history to become famous through his recordings.”
Newhart won a Grammy for Best Album for his debut, as well as Best New Artist of 1960, and won Best Comedy Spoken Word Album for the follow-up, “The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!”
Newhart made numerous appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and also performed in nightclubs, concert halls and on college campuses across the country, but he hated the drunken hecklers who frequented his clubs.
“It ruins the routine because I have to get out of the scene every time and put those birds back in their rightful place,” he said in 1960.
In 2004, he was nominated for an Emmy again, this time as a guest actor in a drama series, for his role on “ER.” In 2007, he received a further honor when the Library of Congress announced that “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” had been added to its registry of historically significant sound recordings.
Newhart hit the bestseller list in 2006 with his autobiography, “I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This!” He was nominated again for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album (a category that includes audiobooks) for his reading of the book.
“I’ve always likened what I do to a man convinced he’s the last sane person on earth, a psychopathic Paul Revere who runs around town yelling, ‘This is madness,’ but no one pays him any attention,” Newhart writes.
George Robert Newhart was born in Chicago to a German-Irish family and was called Bob to avoid confusion with his father, who was also named George.
At St. Ignatius High School and Loyola University in Chicago, he entertained his classmates with impersonations of stars such as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Jimmy Durante. After earning a business degree, Newhart served two years in the Army. After his military service, he returned to Chicago and enrolled in Loyola law school, but dropped out. He eventually got a job as an accountant for the state unemployment insurance department. Bored with the job, Newhart spent his free time acting for a securities firm in suburban Oak Park, which led to his call-in role.
“I wasn’t part of the comedy cabal,” Newhart wrote in his memoir. “It wasn’t like Mike[Nichols]and Elaine[May]and Shelley[Berman]and Lenny Bruce and Johnny Winters and Mort Sahl — we all got together and said, ‘Let’s change up our comedy and slow it down.’ It was just our own way of finding humor. College kids would hear jokes about mothers-in-law and say, ‘What’s a mother-in-law?’ What we did reflected our lives and related to theirs.”
Newhart continued to make occasional television appearances after his fourth sitcom ended, vowing in 2003 to continue appearing whenever he could.
“I’ve accomplished so much in the 43 years of my life. (Quitting) would be like losing something,” he said.
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Former Associated Press writer Bob Thomas contributed to this report.
