Bob Newhart, the beloved stand-up performer whose droll, deadpan humor showcased on two critically acclaimed CBS sitcoms vaulted him into the ranks of history’s greatest comedians, died Thursday morning. He was 94.
The Chicago legend, who won Grammy Awards for album of the year and best new artist for his 1960 breakthrough record, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, died at his Los Angeles home after a series of short illnesses, his longtime publicist, Jerry Digney, announced.
The former accountant famously went without an Emmy Award until 2013, when he finally was given one for guest-starring as Arthur Jeffries (alias Professor Proton, former host of a children’s science show) on CBS’ The Big Bang Theory.
In 1972, MTM Enterprises cast the modest comic as clinical psychologist Bob Hartley, who practiced in the real-life Newhart’s favorite burg, Chicago. The Bob Newhart Show would become one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, featuring a wonderful 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 it had exhausted its bag of tricks. But he was back on CBS in 1982 to front another MTM comedy.
In Newhart, he portrayed Dick Loudon, a New York author turned proprietor of the Stratford Inn in Vermont. The show was a mainstay for eight seasons, and this one also featured a great cast (Mary Frann, Tom Poston — who later would 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 admired series endings in history, Newhart wrapped its 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 whole second series had been a dream.
Newhart’s pauses and stammering were among his trademarks, and his wry observations 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 man with a very deranged 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 Sept. 5, 1929, in Oak Park, Illinois. He grew up a Cubs fan and participated in the team’s victory parade down La Salle Street after Chicago took the National League pennant in 1945. (He was, quite naturally, 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 gaudy profession ran against the Midwestern grain of his personality and perhaps was why he would connect with Middle America.
After attending St. Ignatius College Prep and then earning a degree in commerce from Loyola University, Newhart spent two years in the Army and then flunked out of law school. He then worked as an accountant with U.S. Gypsum and then the 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 in terms of a comedian. You take this fact and you take that fact and then you come up with this ludicrous fact.”
To combat the tedium at work, Newhart and a friend would amuse themselves by making prank phone calls. He refined those into what was then his signature comic bit: having a one-sided phone conversation (the audience got to imagine what the other side of the chat was like).
He and his pal 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. Records executive. The accountant, now a copywriter, had just three routines at the time but came up with more material and landed a contract with the record company.
“Keep in mind, when I started in the late fifties, I didn’t say to myself, ‘Oh, here’s a great void to fill — I’ll be a balding ex-accountant who specializes in low-key humor,’ ” he said. “That’s simply what I was and that’s the direction my mind always went in, so it was natural for me to be that way.”
The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded live at a nightclub in Houston, became the first comedy album to reach the top of the album charts, selling 1.5 million copies as one of the biggest-selling “talk” albums. The bits included such classics as “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” and “Driving Instructor.”
Coming at a time when controversial, harder-edge comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl were taking hold, The Button-Down Mind also earned Newhart a third Grammy for best comedy performance. Suddenly, he was getting booked on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Following two more successful albums, Newhart was offered a weekly TV variety series for the 1961-62 season. The first The Bob Newhart Show won an Emmy for the year’s outstanding program achievement in the field of humor as well as a Peabody Award.
Newhart, however, soon found himself exhausted. “I took all the responsibility for the program seven days a week, 24 hours a day, despite a fine production team,” he once said.
He was offered a spate of sitcoms but turned them down, returning to nightclubs and sharpening his acting skills with TV guest spots and film work, beginning with Don Siegel’s Hell Is for Heroes (1962), starring Steve McQueen, and then in other movies like Hot Millions (1968), Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 (1970) and Norman Lear‘s Cold Turkey (1971).
Newhart Show co-creators Dave Davis and Lorenzo Music had wanted to work with the comic for some time.
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