NEW YORK, NY.- Bob Newhart, who died Thursday at 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy.
Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.
Onstage, he didn’t curse, bust taboos or show anger. His style was gentle and wry. As opposed to motormouth contemporaries like Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl, his defining trait was a cheerful, sloth-paced delivery, stammering, pausing, gradually, meticulously working his way through a sentence. He belonged to neither of the great branches of American humor — the legacies of Jewish or Black comedy. A Roman Catholic from the west side of Chicago, Newhart came off as an entirely respectable example of Midwestern nice.
Newhart brought his own kind of neurosis, a comedy rooted in nuanced deadpan and silence. He was exasperated, clinging to sanity. He wasn’t one to get revenge in a joke. When I met him at his home for an interview tied to his 90th birthday, he had no scores to settle, no grievances or assumptions he was looking to upend. He was even humble and magnanimous talking about death, saying he thought he knew what awaited him after he passed away, but wasn’t sure. Then he joked about a comic who famously (and unfairly) accused him of stealing a bit: “Maybe I’ll come back as Shelley Berman and be pissed at myself.”
Bob Newhart could occasionally get lumped in with the “sick comics” of the mid-20th century, and his early work did have a political, even slangy edge. One of his signature bits, where an advertising man coaches Abraham Lincoln before the Gettysburg Address, was a pointed critique of the cynicism of professional politics. “Hi, Abe, sweetheart” begins the man from Madison Avenue, who encourages him to work in a plug for an Abraham Lincoln T-shirt. When the president says he wants to change “four score and seven years ago” to “87,” the ad man first patiently explains they already test marketed this in Erie. Then he says: “It’s sort of like Mark Antony saying “Friends, Romans, countrymen, I’ve got something I want to tell you.”
This joke seems less subversive today, but just as funny. And that gets to the most remarkable achievement in a career filled with them. Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well. His work doesn’t just live on in its influences, although you can definitely hear his pregnant pauses in the stand-up of Ellen DeGeneres (who has cited him as a key figure in her career).
Put on his old comedy albums and you will chuckle. “The Bob Newhart Show” is half a century old and remains hilarious. Paving the way for shows like “Seinfeld,” he played a straight man surrounded by eccentrics, giving him an opportunity to express endless kinds of exasperation.
Later, his friendship with Don Rickles gave him another wonderful foil to play off. Newhart, who got started in comedy in the 1950s working on bits he taped with a friend, understood that the real partnership in comedy is with the audience, and knew how to plant an idea in their heads and let them run with it. That’s why the phone was such an effective and enduring tool for him. It allowed him to use pauses to tell the story of what you don’t hear.
What made Newhart endure is that the core of his comic appeal was not in a particular satirical target or style, but in its formal brilliance. For a 2014 tribute to Rickles, he made a video whose entire joke was that he was too inept to tell one effectively. The iconic final moment of his series “Newhart” in 1990 ends on a callback to his previous show that finished its run in 1978, essentially making a joke with a punchline that took 12 years.
People are always saying comedy is about timing, but no one tells you what the right speed is. Newhart talked about being born with a sense of time, and even used the metaphor of a metronome inside one’s head. But an art form (and Newhart is part of the reason it’s not pretentious to refer to comedy as one) cannot be broken down like a machine. It evolved in part because of the bold efforts of its greatest artists.
Newhart’s legacy is changing the pace of comedy. To be sure, he was building on the work of Jack Benny, who also knew the value of a long pause and a simple gesture. There is as much music in his reticence as there is in Richard Pryor’s volubility.
Most comedians are in a hurry, filling the room with quips. There’s a wonderful tension to this brand of comedy, but Newhart showed us there is another way. You can find surprise in adjusting speeds just as basketball players like Luka Doncic can get past defenders by moving between slow and slightly less slow.
Not everyone understood. Newhart’s stammer was an incredible tool, but network executives for his TV show told him to stop using it. His response was that the stammer got him a house in Beverly Hills.
Like so many comedians, Newhart lived a long life. Some conclude from this that laughter is the best medicine. Newhart credited it as the secret to a long marriage. But when you listen to his work, a different thought comes to mind. Bob Newhart just took his time.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
