Bob Newhart
◆ US comedian and actor who conquered record charts with one-sided telephone skits
Bob Newhart, comic and actor. Born: 5 September 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois. Died: 18 July 2024 in Los Angeles, aged 94
Bob Newhart was half of one of the funniest comedy duos ever. He was the straight guy – and the funny guy was the audience’s imagination.
Newhart helped revolutionise stand-up in the United States, moving away from straightforward gags with punchlines, employing instead a deadpan or incredulous delivery of one side of a conversation, in which a sceptical listener often has to repeat what the other guy said because the details seem so absurd he suspects he must have misheard.
His most celebrated routines included conversations between an increasingly nervous driving instructor and his unseen pupil.
Another was an imagined telephone conversation between the representative of an import company and Sir Walter Raleigh about tobacco. We hear only the prospective importer as he listens to Raleigh’s proposal, often repeating the details in disbelief.
Raleigh, unheard on the other end of a phone, explains that he has bought 80 tons of leaves. The importer tells him there are plenty leaves in England already, but Raleigh explains they are special leaves with various different uses.
Firstly he tries to explain snuff. “You take a pinch of tobacco, and you shove it up your nose and it makes you sneeze?” says Newhart. “I imagine it would, Walt.”
Then Raleigh goes on to explain cigarettes and the would-be importer repeats the details to make sure he is getting it right. “You can shred it up... And put it in a piece of paper… And roll it up... Don't tell me, Walt, don't tell me. You stick it in your ear, right? Oh, between your lips! Then what do you do, Walt? You set fire to it... You inhale the smoke... Walt, it seems you can stand in front of your fireplace and have the same thing going for you.”
Newhart’s one-sided comedy technique was not entirely new, dating back to the early days of telephone and the 1913 monologue Cohen on the Telephone by a vaudevillian called Joe Hayman.
But Newhart revitalised it and caused a sensation with his first appearances and first live recording, The Button-down Mind of Bob Newhart, which includes his driving instructor routine, Abraham Lincoln clashing with marketing gurus over the wording of the Gettysburg address, and the inventor of baseball trying to explain the rules to a games company executive and convince him that he is not just winding him up.
The Button-down Mind of Bob Newhart stayed at No 1 in the US album charts for 14 weeks, it won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards and Newhart remains the only comic ever to win the Grammy for Best New Artist. At one point he held both the No 1 and No 2 spots in the US album charts, a feat that went unequalled until Guns N’ Roses did it in the 1990s.
In the UK The Button-down Mind of Bob Newhart spent 35 weeks in the Top 20 and peaked at No 2 in December 1960, ahead of Cliff Richard and Frank Sinatra, denied the top spot only by the recordbreaking soundtrack for South Pacific.
The son of a plumber, George Robert Newhart was born and grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. He was called Bob from childhood to distinguish him for his father, who was also George. He took a degree in Business Administration at the Loyola University in Chicago, had a stint in the US army in a desk job during the Korean war and returned to Loyola to begin a law degree.
But he found Law dull and dropped out in favour of a job in accounting, though his modus operandi of “close enough” suggested this may not have been the ideal career either. To relieve the boredom, he and a colleague would improvise comic conversations on the phone.
Newhart developed the concept into the one-sided phone conversation, he made rough tapes, was signed by Warner Bros and became something of a phenomenon.
In the 1970s and 1980s he starred in two successful long-running sitcoms. In The Bob Newhart Show he was a Chicago psychologist called Bob Hartley. And in Newhart he was a Vermont innkeeper called Dick Loudon.
At the end of the last episode of the eighth and final season of Newhart, Dick wakes up as psychologist Bob Hartley and it turns out that everything that happened on all eight seasons of Newhart had been a dream. It was a poke at Dallas, which had done something similar, but not for comedy effect, a few years earlier. It was voted the best finale ever by the American magazine TV Guide.
Subsequent sitcoms in which he starred in the 1990s were less successful. Newhart won his only Emmy award in 2013 for his role as Professor Proton in The Big Bang Theory, a recurring guest character that he also played in the spinoff, Young Sheldon.
Newhart also had a successful career in supporting roles in movies, beginning with the 1962 war film Hell is for Heroes, in which he provided some light relief, doing his one-sided conversation routine with a walkie-talkie instead of a phone. He voiced the mouse Bernard in the Disney animated films The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under and he was Papa Elf in the classic Christmas comedy Elf.
His wife Ginnie died last year. They had been married for 60 years. They are survived by four children, all of whom work in the entertainment industry.