He was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1929 -- the second (and only son) of four (mostly) Irish-Catholic children. After stateside military service during the Korean War, he became an accountant, quit one year later. Then gave us this:
The first comedy album to hit Billboard's #1.
As Fred Astaire is the Mozart of American dance, Bob Newhart is the Astaire of American comedy. Dry, smooth, informal, light, perfect -- Newhart's is a comedy unpressured by extraneous events, by social hierarchy, by Attitude. Like Astaire, he was a master craftsman who required total control over his albums, television shows, and live appearances. His delivery is miraculously low-key, elegant, yet somehow omnipotent: he is the only one with pure moral clarity, the only one who sees the world as it truly is. This leaves him, of course, generally on the outside of the joke. But not always. . .
His first television series was called The Bob Newhart Show, one-hour of weekly variety that would win an Emmy and a Peabody, and would promptly be cancelled.
Following cancellation, he did a hysterical turn in Don Siegel's goofy Hell is for Heroes (1962).
A new variety show beckoned, The Entertainers in '64.
Then he got into some trouble, with Bob Newhart Faces Bob Newhart: for joking about giving birth, Adolf Hitler, and poodle poop. How times have changed. . .
During our transition from the open vistas of '67 and '68 to Richard the Undertaker, Newhart appeared in Hot Millions (1968), Vincente Minnelli's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), Catch-22 (1970), and Norman Lear's flat comedy about cigarette smoking, Cold Turkey (1971).
Then came Dr. Bob Hartley. The Bob Newhart Show (1972-78) is as legendary and beloved as is the CBS Saturday night dream line-up it was part of: All in the Family (8:00pm), M*A*S*H (8:30), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (9:00), Bob (9:30), The Carol Burnett Show (10:00). (Saturday night? Wasn't the 70s the Swing Decade?) Among the group, it is the most unique and least dated: laconic and shapely, it has none of the righteousness, nothing of the sweet tooth of its time. There are many brilliant episodes. Yet it is less great than its future competitor Newhart. There's a strange over-focus on professional status, a pre-Yuppie-ism years before that plague would infect us all. (Newhart's 80s greatness partly lies in its enchanted disgust with all things Yuppie.) And Suzanne Pleshette gives Newhart sex -- and that's a problem here. Again like Astaire, Bob Newhart's genius is apart from sex: self-contained and abstract, he needs a partner transparent, someone who can drape him (as does Rogers, as does Mary Frann) with the insides or outsides of the joke. The dark, passionate, and incomparable Pleshette is far from transparent.
One of the loveliest and funniest episodes of the 70s series holds Newhart's classical combination of grace, astonishment, and kindness in perfect balance. The final show of Season Four stars his good friend Tom Poston (as The Peeper), from February 1976.
Newhart (1982-90) is his masterpiece -- a sort of necromantic world where the dead are all dear oddballs and innkeeper Dick Louden a ghost apart. (How appropriate it would end as a dream.) Imagine the moments in Bringing Up Baby when Grant and Hepburn are led by leopard Baby into the midsummer's night of Connecticut -- with the heavy Hawks touch replaced by a gentler, kinder hand; and the bedroom communities of Connecticut turned into a Vermont of the mind. In Vermont Bob Newhart's surreal astonishments take flight apart from the weightiness of Chicago. Here the weather is magical, not restricting. There are no Bulls, Cubs, or Bears. No trains, elevators, or moo goo gai pan. There are woodsmen and bell-towers, the prettiest clown in the world and a runaway heiress. And it leaves him, and us, generous-hearted, without ballast. Here, we laugh with Newhart, never really at him, or at others, no matter how unknowing they might be. Despite his moral clarity, we never laugh from a height above, always at about the same level as the folks in the story. Everyone does indeed have their reasons.
Bob at the center on the outside looking in: "Co-Hostess Twinkie" from September 1986.
But sometimes, the world comes to him. From October '86, "Dick the Kid"
There were two more series in the 90s: Bob (1992-93), a 33-episode wonderment where Newhart plays a comic book creator working for a quadruply-merged company called AmCanTranConComCo (it is great and I so wish there were episodes available to show); and a real thud named George & Leo (1997-98) teaming him up with the ever-obnoxious Judd Hirsch(!).
We come full circle. In between the two failures, Newhart did an HBO special featuring his classic material, fresher than ever.
Beside Astaire, there is also something of Fitzgerald in Bob Newhart, a personal style which promises it would be sacrilege to give offense in a social situation, and in part the manner of Irish elegance: that a man must be caught dead before he takes himself seriously. It was Fitzgerald, after all, who first suggested that one could become the nicest man in the world. . .
