Bob Newhart, Before the Sitcoms

Bob Newhart, who died this week at 94, had a long enough career that nearly every generation could conjure up fond memories of him. He was the star of two long-running TV sitcoms, one in the ’70s and another in the ’80s; a ubiquitous presence on TV talk and variety shows for decades; a revered elder statesman of comedy, awarded the Mark Twain Prize in 2002 and an Emmy (his first) at age 83, for a guest-starring role in The Big Bang Theory. 

But it was with his revolutionary stand-up comedy of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s that Newhart made his most important and lasting mark.

He grew up in Chicago, worked in advertising and as an accountant, and had no stage experience at all when, in early 1960, he recorded some comedy bits that he and a friend had devised for local radio stations. The resulting album,  The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, was an unexpected smash hit, the first comedy album in history to reach No. 1 on the Billboard charts and staying there for an almost unimaginable (for anyone not named Taylor Swift) 14 weeks. 

He brought something entirely fresh to stand-up comedy. He eschewed the gag lines and rat-a-tat rhythms of the Borscht Belt comics, or the overt social commentary and provocative material of other stand-up innovators of the era like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. Instead, he created leisurely, naturalistic comic scenes, in which he typically acted out one half of a telephone conversation. It was a satiric style strongly influenced by the improvisational theater of the Compass Players (where Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May — Newhart’s closest comedic cousins — got their start) and its more famous successor, Second City.      

In his most characteristic bits, Newhart embodied a consistent character type: the stammering, self-effacing Organization Man, desperately trying to play by the rules and avoid making waves, in the midst of a chaotic, often threatening world. It was gentle but potent satire, a comedy of manners for the uptight, conformist, paranoid Eisenhower era. 

In one bit, for example, Newhart is the night watchman on duty the night King Kong climbs up the Empire State Building, timidly calling his supervisor for help in dealing with a problem not covered in the employees’ manual. In another he’s a long-suffering driving instructor, trying to keep his cool in the face of an inept woman driver (a sexual stereotype that wouldn’t be tolerated today — but who cares?). He was a master of timing, conjuring entire scenes with his pregnant pauses. “Turn right here …. Well, now that was my fault; you see, I meant the next street. Not this man’s lawn.”   

He delved into history, portraying great events and great men through the lens of our modern, blinkered, commercialized sensibility. The head of the East India Company in England tries to stifle his laughter as he listens to Sir Walter Raleigh describe his new discovery from America: tobacco. “You can shred it up … put it on a piece of paper … and roll it up? Don’t tell me, don’t tell me — you stick it in your ear, right Walt?” Or, turning the tables on history, imagining the shrewd PR man who tries to keep Abe Lincoln from fouling up the Gettysburg Address: “You what? You typed it? Abe, how many times have we told you — on the backs of envelopes.”

Newhart brought acting to stand-up comedy, along with a relatable comic persona, which made him especially well suited to sitcoms — playing a psychiatrist and a small-town innkeeper, people forced to keep their composure amid the parade of nuts and neurotics who pass through their doors. But the sitcoms don’t age as well as his early stand-up routines — unique (no great comedian has fewer imitators), universal, and as funny as they ever were.