Bob Newhart Dies: Revered Deadpan Comic & Star Of Two Hit Sitcoms Was 94
Bob Newhart, an Emmy winner and nine-time nominee who helped launch the recorded comedy craze with two smash stand-up albums before starring in the revered TV shows The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart, died today at his Los Angeles home. He was 94.
His longtime publicist Jerry Digney said Newhart died after a series of short illnesses.
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Newhart broke out in 1960 with a pair of No. 1 comedy albums — despite never having done stand-up before. The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart spent 14 weeks atop the Billboard 200 and stayed on that chart for more than two years. The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! arrived about 10 months later and also hit No. 1. The former won Grammys for Album of the Year, Comedy Album of the Year and Best New Artist and featured a slow-spoken still-cited monologue with Newhart as Abe Lincoln.
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“I worked as an accountant for 2? years, then worked as a copywriter,” he said in a 2001 interview for the Television Academy Foundation. “People had always been saying, ‘Gee, you’re funny. You think funny.’ So I just decided I was gonna give it a try and see what happened.”
Watch him discuss his stand-up career during that interview here:
The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! won the 1961 Comedy Album Grammy, and both of his 1960 LPs are included in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Together, they helped usher in the Golden Age of recorded comedy that saw massive sales for the likes of Bill Cosby, Allan Sherman, The First Family and many others and would last through the 1970s. Newhart began to tour the national comedy circuit for rapturous crowds.
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Newhart scored another Grammy nom nearly a half-century later for his 2006 spoken-work album I shouldn’t Even Be Doing This!
“When I first started out in stand-up, I just remember the sound of laughter,” he once said. “It’s one of the great sounds of the world.”
Born on September 5, 1929, in suburban Chicago, Newhart’s first move to TV was with the NBC comedy-variety series The Bob Newhart Show, spawned from his first album and featuring his ad-libbed phone call comedy that inspired similar famous bits by Lily Tomlin and Mike Nichols & Elaine May. It lasted just one season in 1961-62, earning a Peabody Award. But he would return to the medium in a huge way a decade later.
Sitcom The Bob Newhart Show debuted on CBS in September 1972. It did well right from the start, finishing in the year-end three-network primetime Top 20 in each of its first three seasons, ultimately running to 1978. Newhart starred as Bob Hartley, a successful psychologist in Chicago whose deadpan delivery drove the series.
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Suzanne Pleshette was his schoolteacher wife, but the other regular characters often stole their scenes. Among them were Carol (Marcia Wallace), the brash receptionist Bob shared with a dentist in the same suite, and Bob’s orthodontist friend Jerry (Peter Bonerz). The cast also included Penny Marshall.
Newhart scored an Emmy nom for writing during the show’s first season — it ranked No. 41 on the WGA’s 2013 list of the 101 Best Written TV Series of All Time — and the series won for Outstanding Program Achievement in the Field of Humor. The Bob Newhart Show earned renewed fame in its syndication afterlife, fueling the popular “Hi Bob” drinking game. Here’s how Saturday Night Live had some fun with that:
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The star would return to TV in 1982 with another CBS sitcom, Newhart. This time he played, Dick Loudon, a “how-to” book author who took over a long-closed colonial inn in Vermont. Mary Frann played his wife, but — as with Newhart’s 1970s show — his co-stars often stood out. Among them George (Tom Poston), the inn’s crusty caretaker whose family had been doing that job for two centuries. Other standouts were Larry, Darryl and Darryl, (William Sanderson, Tony Papenfuss and John Voldstad), who could challenge for the title of World’s Most Useless Handymen.
The series finished its rookie season tied as the No. 12 series in primetime and would remain in the Top 30 for several years. Newhart would score three consecutive Emmy noms for Lead Actor in a Comedy from 1985-87. It was nominated for 25 Emmys over its eight-season, 184-episode run — but it never won a single statuette.
The Newhart series finale in May 1990 is widely considered one of TV’s greatest. After eight very well-watched seasons, the Dick Martin-directed episode “The Last Newhart” saw the Vermont town where the series was set in purchased by Japanese businessmen who wanted to build a luxury resort. The set was dark at the very end, and suddenly Newhart’s Bob Hartley character from the 1970s sitcom wakes up in his Chicago apartment with Pleshette, his wife from that show, beside him. Announcing he had the weirdest dream, Newhart throws the whole Newhart show into a wonderful TV trope. Pleshette’s Emily tells him to go back to bed, admonishing, “No more Japanese food before you go to bed.”
Two TV seasons later in September 1992, Newhart returned to CBS in a new sitcom, titled simply Bob. This time, he played a temperamental, often bitter comic-book writer — a far cry from the lovable and mild-mannered characters who had charmed viewers for two decades. The show didn’t click and aired its final episode in late 1993.
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Newhart went on to guest on TV comedies including Murphy Brown and The Simpsons and voiced a role in the 1990 toon feature The Rescuers Down Under. He returned to the CBS sitcom game again in 1997, starring opposite Judd Hirsch in George & Leo. Newhart played a Martha’s Vineyard bookstore owner whose quiet life is rattled by the arrival of Leo, a small-time Las Vegas hood whose estranged daughter was marrying George’s son. It lasted only one low-rated season.
Newhart had big-screen roles in the 1997 Kevin Kline feature comedy In & Out and the 2003 Reese Witherspoon sequel, but his best-known movie was Elf, also in 2003. He played Papa Elf, the adoptive dad of Will Ferrell’s Buddy Hobbs, an oversize human whose elfin upbringing leads to myriad adventures when he finds out that indeed he is not an elf and that his father (James Caan) is in New York City. Newhart’s elf ears and characteristic deadpan delivery made audiences cheer.
Newhart continued his TV and film career through the 2000s, on the silver screen in two The Librarian sequels and Horrible Bosses. He also did arcs on the popular series ER and Desperate Housewives and guested on TV’s The Librarians, NCIS, Hot in Cleveland and other shows. But he might be most recognizable to younger audiences for his recurring role in CBS megahit The Big Bang Theory.
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In Chuck Lorre’s sitcom, Newhart played Arthur Jeffries aka Professor Proton, the star of a former kids science show who is hired to entertain Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Leonard (Johnny Galecki). An instant fan favorite, Newhart showed up in six episodes spanning five seasons and won his only career Emmy in 2013. He also was nominated as Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for the role two other times, in 2014 and 2018.
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A longtime friend of Johnny Carson, Newhart substituted as host of The Tonight Show nearly 90 times. He also hosted Saturday Night Live twice, in 1980 and 1995; watch his monologue for the latter below. He was spotlighted in a 2005 American Masters special on PBS, and Button Down Concert, a home video based on his classic routines, arrived the following year.
Newhart was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1999 and received the Mark Twain Prize for American humor three years later.
Newhart is survived by four children — Jennifer, Courtney, Timothy and Robert — and numerous grandchildren. His wife of 60 years, Virginia “Ginnie” Newhart, died last year.
Dominic Patten contributed to this report
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