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| 1929-2024 |
Bob Newhart famously started out as an accountant, and looked and even talked like a James Thurber cartoon character come to life. Except Newhart did what no Thurber character in drawing or prose was ever destined to do, and that is quit his job and become a stand-up comedian. He explains how he managed to pull off such a transformation in this 2005 interview with Larry King. Watch:
King mentions an "album that took off", I believe he's talking about...
...this album, which hit number one on Billboard in August of 1960 and stayed there for the next 14 weeks. Up against Frank Sinatra, Harry Bellefonte, and Nat King Cole, it eventually won a Grammy for Album of the Year, the first comedy album to do so.
So what was so special about Newhart's style of comedy? First off, he was part of a late 1950s-early1960s alternative comedy movement that eschewed the vaudeville tried-and-true rat-a-tat-tat setup-punchline-rimshot drumbeat for something somewhat more thoughtful. And contemporary. At least it was contemporary 60 years ago. Newhart himself can describe it best: “There was a big sea change in comedy. There was Mike [Nichols] and Elaine [May], Shelley Berman, myself, Jonathan Winters and Lenny Bruce. We all kind of happened at the same time and the humor was different than the humor before that, when there were a lot of wife jokes . . .and they had no relevance to college kids who picked up these albums, which were about their fears and their concerns about life. They would get the record albums and go to someone’s dorm room and get beer and pizzas and someone had a record player. Those were their nightclubs. I think they really created that demand.”
Here's a good example of Newhart's style, which (like the aforementioned Berman) frequently involved the use of a telephone. The setup and punchline are still there, but no rimshot. You get to decide for yourself whether to laugh:
I laughed, though in-between laughs I found it strange that this...
...goes unmentioned. Had only someone hung up the phone on Sir Walter.
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George, Gracie, Bob, and Jack. Newhart may have been part of a new breed of comic, but he respected his elders, and they respected him. In particular, Newhart had a lot in common with Jack Benny when it came to drollery and deadpan reactions, the latter of which may have reached full bloom on...
...this show.
Bob Newhart plays Bob Hartley, a Chicago mental health professional. What kind of mental health professional? MTM Productions originally wanted him to play a psychiatrist (who can prescribe medication), but Newhart felt he'd better off playing a psychologist (who can't prescribe medication), as their patients have less severe problems, and thus the potential for comedy is, well, safer:
You really wouldn't treat that kind problem with medication? Apparently not back in the 1970s. As I type this, I've actually spent the last hour trying to find out what exactly the mental health establishment (of which through my own experiences I've come to have a great deal of respect) thought of The Bob Newhart Show, but nothing good or bad comes up. Whatever their diagnoses, what made the show truly funny wasn't the severity (or silliness) of the patients' problems but nice guy Dr. Hartley's well-meaning hesitancy in trying to do right by them. And it wasn't just in his professional life he tried to do right, but in his...
...personal life as well:
Remember that bedroom, as we move on to Bob Newhart's next...
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Here Newhart plays a writer of how-to books named Dick Louden who moves with his wife to Vermont and buys a Revolutionary War-era inn. Just how different was Dick Louden from Bob Hartley? Watch the now-legendary ending of the series finale for that answer:
The deadpan remains the same.
I thought of you when I heard of his death yesterday. I wondered if you had already began writing this before Newhart died. I can vaguely remember him on tv. But I loved his transatlantic telephone call to Walt and I featured it on my old blog.
ReplyDeleteAndrew, it's the other way around. I heard of Newhart's death Thursday night, but since I had to get up to go to work the next morning, chose to get some shuteye rather than work on a post that could have taken hours. I made the right choice because when I finally started to work on it, indeed it did take hours. I finished about three-thirty this morning. This is why I'm choosy about whose obits I do. Only people I've at one time or other taken an interest in (and even then not at all if something else comes up, like an attempted assassination) and NEVER anybody simply because they're famous.
DeleteI loved Bob Newhart and his "hesitant delivery" style -- always so funny, no matter what he did. A true legend! RIP
ReplyDeleteDebra, I didn't have time to go into his occasional movie appearances, but I love the scene in Elf where he hesitantly informs Buddy (Will Ferril) that he's not an elf after all but a human being.
DeleteYeah, he ROCKED that role!
DeleteRIP Bob. This man was a legend. Very clever fellow and so funny. My dad introduced me to him in the 90s when I was a teenager! Thanks for the laughs Bob. :-D
ReplyDeleteYour father was a good man, Ananka. I'm curious, did he introduce you to the 1960s comedy album Newhart, the 1970s and '80s sitcom Newhart, or both? Any one of those things were worth the introduction.
DeleteHe certainly was Kirk. It was the famous Sir Walter Raleigh skit. He had some records and cassettes of Bob. I watch a lot of his skit on Youtube now, so much available there. :-D
DeleteI loved his stand-up and was a huge fan of the Bob Newhart Show. Enjoyed the later show, Newhart, but didn’t follow it religiously. Still, thought the final episode was brilliant.
ReplyDeleteMitchell, I think that last Newhart can best be described as an existential take on the Bob Newhart persona.
DeleteDarryl and Darryl SPEAK!
ReplyDeleteMike, up to that last episode, those two actors who played the Darryls spent five seasons or whatever just nodding hello. Well, you can't say they stepped on anybody's lines.
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