RIP Bob Newhart
We were totally scammed and we loved it!
It was easily the greatest ending to a television comedy in history. I never even heard the lines I was laughing so hard. It was without question a “you had to be there to understand” moment. There had been all kinds of rumors going around about how Newhart would end. Mostly they’d promised something really intolerable. That Bob, who had been a fixture in our lives throughout the 1980s was going to be killed by a golfball in the series finale.
That final scene transporting Bob Newhart back to his bedroom and wife from his previous TV series left the country howling.
It was the perfect way to end a TV show that had been in the background of our lives for eight years. It was kind of understated but it was always reliable for a good laugh. You could say the exact same thing about the Bob Newhart show (1972-1978), for that matter, you could say the same thing about Bob Newhart himself.
Robert Newhart was a born Chicagoan, he came into the world in the same year as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, I can picture his reaction to it if he was asked, “Coincidence?” He was of German-Irish descent, Newhart being a WWI-era Americanized version of Neuharff, he attended Catholic school at Saint Catherine’s and then Saint Ignatius which is about as Chicago as it gets. After college he was drafted into the Army where he served as a clerk, (of course) when he got out he became an accountant (also of course). He came across as the most button-down guy on Earth. When he moved into advertising he and a friend started making absurd telephone calls to each other and recording them. His family thought they were drop-dead hilarious and begged him to send them to the radio station, which he did.
His shtick was completely unique. Any comedian will tell you that having a straight man makes the job ridiculously easy. But Bob Newhart was a solo straight man.
His album did well enough that he was thrown a variety show in 1961.
It bombed but he was well thought of enough that he was always on the variety show guest star circuit. He came across as the steady-as-a-rock grey man. Somebody who was mostly staying calm while the whole world was exploding around him. Which it was. The Peabody Board cited him as “a person whose gentle satire and wry and irreverent wit waft a breath of fresh and bracing air through the stale and stuffy electronic corridors. A merry marauder, who looks less like St. George than a choirboy, Newhart has wounded, if not slain, many of the dragons that stalk our society.”
In 1972 the husband and wife team of Mary Tyler Moore and Lorenzo Music came to Newhart with an idea for a show about a psychiatrist named, “Bob.” Being the only sane guy in a room full of crazies was his bread and butter. It lasted for six years but when the ratings went into a steady decline he pulled the plug.
Back then, one very successful TV show was all you were going to get. However, Newhart managed to make lightning strike twice with Newhart. This second show was about a TV talk show host turned Vermont innkeeper. It was the one that came closest to knocking it out of the park. From 1982 to 1990 he was there every night dealing with insanity all around him and being hilariously deadpan about it. It ran for eight years and back then that made for a hefty income on syndication and cable.
He did try to launch a few other series in the 1990s but they didn’t really take. He settled contentedly into the role of dedicated character actor during that decade. He was never out of work. In 2003 he played a dramatic guest role in ER for three episodes and was nominated for an Emmy for the first time in his entire career.
He would finally win an Emmy for his guest appearances as Professor Proton in The Big Bang Theory.
He would reprise the role for Young Sheldon, making his final appearance in 2020. He appears to have retired after that.
He passed on July 18 of 2024 after a brief illness. He is survived by his wife and four children.
“The only difference between Bob Newhart on stage and Bob Newhart offstage is that there is no stage.”
Bob Newhart
1929-2024
