Bob Newhart

Bob Newhart (born September 5, 1929) is an American stand-up comedian and actor.

Early life

He was born George Robert Newhart in Oak Park, Illinois of Irish and German extraction to George David Newhart and Julia Pauline Burns, both of whom were devout Catholics. A sister, M. Joan Newhart, is a Roman Catholic nun.

Newhart attended St. Ignatius College Prep and graduated in 1952 from Loyola University Chicago with a business degree. He was drafted in the U.S. Army, and served stateside during the Korean War until discharged in 1954.

Early career

After the war he got a job as an accountant for United States Gypsum. He later claimed that his motto, "That's close enough", shows he didn't have the temperament to be an accountant. He also claimed to have been a clerk in the unemployment office who made $60 a week but who quit upon learning weekly unemployment benefits were $55 a week and "they only had to come in to the office one day a week to collect it". In 1958 he became an advertising copywriter for Fred A. Niles, a major independent film and television producer in Chicago. It was at the company that he and a coworker would entertain each other in long telephone calls which they would record then send to a radio station as audition tapes. When his coworker ended his participation, Newhart continued the recordings alone, developing the shtick which was to serve him well for decades. In addition to his various standup bits, he incorporated that schtick into his television series at appropriate times.

Stand-up comedy albums

The auditions led to his break-through recording contract. A disk jockey at the radio station -- Dan Sorkin, who later became the announcer-sidekick on his NBC series -- introduced Newhart to the head of talent at Warner Brothers Records, which signed him only a year after the label was formed, based solely on those recordings. He expanded his material into a stand-up routine which he began to perform at nightclubs.

His 1960 comedy album, The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart, went straight to number one on the charts, beating Elvis Presley and the cast album of The Sound of Music. Button Down Mind received the 1961 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Newhart also won Best New Artist, and his quickly-released follow-on album, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back, won Best Comedy Performance - Spoken Word that same year.

Subsequent comedy albums include Behind the Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart (1961), The Button-Down Mind on TV (1962), Bob Newhart Faces Bob Newhart (1964), The Windmills Are Weakening (1965), This Is It (1967), Best of Bob Newhart (1971), and Very Funny Bob Newhart (1973).

Years later he released The Button-Down Concert (1997) and Something Like This (2001), an anthology of his 1960s Warner Bros. albums.

Television

Newhart's success in stand-up led to his own NBC variety show in 1961, The Bob Newhart Show. The show lasted only a single season, yet earned Newhart an Emmy Award nomination and a Peabody Award. 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 a troubled and apprehensive world, Newhart has proved once again that laughter is the best medicine.

In the mid-1960s, Newhart appeared on The Dean Martin Show 24 times, and The Ed Sullivan Show eight times. He appeared in a 1963 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

From 1972 to 1978, Newhart starred in the popular Bob Newhart Show on CBS in which he played a Chicago psychologist and husband of co-star, Suzanne Pleshette as "Emily".

Newhart guest hosted The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson a total of 87 times; he hosted Saturday Night Live twice, in 1980 and again in 1995.

In 1982, Newhart returned to primetime with a new sitcom, Newhart, on CBS, co-starring Mary Frann. When the show went off the air in 1990, it ended with a surreal scene (met by screams of laughter from the studio audience) in which Newhart wakes up in the morning on the set of his 1970s series. He realizes (in a takeoff on a plot element in the TV series Dallas a few years earlier) that the entire Newhart series was a nightmare provoked by "eating too much Japanese food before going to bed." (The final Newhart episode had him selling his country inn to Japanese investors). Recalling Mary Frann's buxom figure and her choice of clothing, Bob closes the segment and the series by telling Emily, "You should wear more sweaters!" before the typical closing notes of the old Bob Newhart Show theme play over the fadeout.

In 1992, Newhart made an attempt to come back to television with a series called Bob. But it did not develop a strong audience and went off the air two years later. In 1997, Newhart returned again with George and Leo on CBS with Judd Hirsch.

In 2001, Bob made an appearance on MAD TV (Season 6), playing a psychiatrist who yells "Stop it!" in a very memorable skit. It is widely regarded as one of the funniest bits ever on the show.

His other television work includes:

The Entertainers (regular performer in 1964)
Thursday's Game (1974)
Marathon (1980)
Ladies and Gentlemen... Bob Newhart (1980)
Ladies and Gentlemen... Bob Newhart Part II (1981)
The Entertainers (1991)
The Simpsons (1997)
The Sports Pages (2001)
Quest for the Spear (2004)

More recently he guest-starred on ER in a very rare dramatic role which earned him an Emmy Award nomination, his first in nearly twenty years. In 2005 he began a recurring role in Desperate Housewives as Morty, the on-again/off-again boyfriend of Sophie (Lesley Ann Warren), Susan Mayer's (Teri Hatcher) mother.

Persona

Newhart is known for his deadpan delivery and a slight stammer which early on he incorporated into the persona around which he built a successful career. On his TV shows, although he got his share of funny lines, often he worked in the Jack Benny tradition of being the "straight man" while the sometimes somewhat bizarre cast members surrounding him got the laughs.

Several of his funniest bits involve hearing one half of a conversation as he spoke to someone over the phone. For example, in a routine called King Kong, a rookie security guard at the Empire State Building seeks guidance as to how to deal with an ape who is "18 to 19 stories high, depending on whether we have a 13th floor or not". He assures his boss he has looked in the guards manual "under 'ape' and 'ape's toes'".

Filmography

Two of Newhart's most memorable roles were in two very different military-themed films, the 1962 film Hell Is for Heroes (where he provided some comic relief using his man-on-the-telephone routine), and his portrayal of Major Major Major Major in the 1970 film version of Catch-22.

He also appeared in:

Hot Millions (1968)
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970)
Catch-22 (1970)
Cold Turkey (1971)
The Rescuers (1977) (voice)
Little Miss Marker (1980)
First Family (1980)
The Rescuers Down Under (1990) (voice)
In & Out (1997)
Red, White and Blonde (2003)
Elf (2003)

Honors

In addition to his Peabody Award and several Emmy nominations, Newhart's recognitions include the following:

In 1993 Newhart was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.
In 1998, Billboard magazine recognized Newhart's first album as #20 on their list of most popular albums of the past 40 years, and the only comedy album on the list.
On January 6, 1999 Newhart received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In 2002 he won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
In 2004, Newhart was #14 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 greatest standups of all time.
On July 27, 2004, the American cable television network TV Land unveiled a statue of Newhart on the Magnificent Mile in his native Chicago, depicting Dr. Robert Hartley from The Bob Newhart Show.
Three Grammy awards in 1961: Best New Artist, Best Comedy Performance (Spoken Word) and Album of the Year for The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.

Personal life

Newhart was introduced by Buddy Hackett to Virginia Quinn, the woman who became his wife on January 12, 1963, the daughter of late character actor Bill Quinn. The two have four children (Robert, Timothy, Jennifer, and Courtney), and several grandchildren. His son Rob (who portrayed his father in 1993's Heart & Souls, with Robert Downey Jr.) maintains his father's official website.

Newhart and his wife are fast friends with comedian Don Rickles and his wife, and they often vacation together. Newhart and Rickles appeared together on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on January 24, 2005, the Monday following Johnny Carson's death, reminiscing about their many guest appearances on Carson's show.

In March 2005, Hyperion Books announced that they would publish Newhart's autobiography in 2006.

Trivia

The appearance of Suzanne Pleshette on the final scene of the final episode of Newhart introduced a technique that is sometimes known as "breaking the fifth wall" — an analogy with breaking the fourth wall in which the fifth wall becomes the convention that two television characters could not be the same person. The idea for that scene came from Newhart's wife.
During Newhart's television career he repeatedly resisted playing a father. When presented with a script of The Bob Newhart Show in which his character's wife was revealed to be pregnant, Newhart's response to the writers about the script was "Suzanne and I love the script, but who are you going to get to play Bob?"
His stand up comedy routines are famous for being one-sided conversations, in which he has a conversation with someone, but only his side of the conversation is heard by the audience.
Like Bill Cosby, Newhart seldom uses profanity for humorous effect. The closest Newhart comes is in his bit "The Driving Instructor," where he makes a lame attempt at a joke with an angry pedestrian, and then merely echoes the unseen/unheard pedestrian by saying, "No, I don't suppose it is so damn funny."

External links

Official website
Bob Newhart profile from American Masters
About Bob Newhart, from the Comedy College website
Hyperion To Publish Bob Newhart's Memoir, from a media and publishing website
The MadTV "Stop It!" sketch on YouTube