RIP Bob Newhart, a Very Funny Man and an Underrated Revolutionary

When you think about the cultural revolutions of the last 60 or 70 years — and really, who doesn’t? — you may not immediately think of Bob Newhart, who died Thursday at the age of 94.

If you think of Bob Newhart at all — and anyone who can use a few moments of sheer pleasure should — you probably mostly think he was funny. Very, very funny.

That’s true. He was. He also helped implement a revolution.

What Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly and company did with popular music in the late ’50s and early ’60s, shifting the axis to a new sound, a group of equally diverse men and women did at the same time in the field of comedy.

“People say nothing happened in the ‘50s,” Newhart said in a 2014 interview. “But there was a real undercurrent of change, certainly in comedy. You had Jonathan Winters, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Shelley Berman, myself, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce.”

Okay, no one ever conflated Newhart with Lenny Bruce. Newhart’s point remains: Revolution takes a village, and just as the Shirelles didn’t sing like Elvis Presley, the ultimate impact of the new comedy wave was collective and came from all over the map.

“It started with college kids,” Newhart said. “They didn’t want to hear ‘Take my wife, please’ any more. They were our audience and it built from there.”

It’s sometimes forgotten that comedy in the late ’50s and early ’60s was mass popular entertainment, often crossing generational lines in ways that Ella Fitzgerald and the Beach Boys sometimes did not.

Newhart’s first album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, won the Grammy for album of the year in 1961, beating Frank Sinatra and Harry Belafonte.

Newhart played the same character on records, and on stage, that he would later play to greater acclaim on TV sitcoms: a mild-mannered, reasonable man who wanted calm conversations on matters of simple common sense, except he kept running into people who didn’t seem to have any.

In these imaginary encounters, he might envision Abe Lincoln fending off a slick public relations person who thought Abe needed to brand himself better. He might draw a Sir Walter Raleigh into explaining why drying and smoking a plant was a gold mine of an idea. Newhart himself refrained from telling the unseen person that he or she was stark raving nuts. That pleasure was left to the audience, which enhanced the joke.

Those routines also enabled Newhart to cast himself as straight man, a role he played as well as the all-time straight man master, Jack Benny.

“There was a story told to me by Frederick De Cordova [producer of Benny’s TV show],” Newhart recalled in 2014. “Jack would see the script and say, ‘Okay, give that line to Dennis’ or ‘Give that line to Richard Carlson.’ And at the end Carlson said, ‘You’ve given away most of your lines’ and Benny said, ‘Good.’ ”

Benny was otherwise not a big influence on Newhart’s comic persona. Newhart himself credited Bob and Ray, who remained droll and sincere facing the winds of absurdity. There was also a whiff of Tommy Smothers, a straight man didn’t always grasp a situation or conversation on the first try. Tip of the cap here to Stan Laurel and Art Carney’s Ed Norton.

Newhart looked like a guy who had gone to business school to become an accountant, which is exactly what he was when he and an office colleague started amusing themselves with imagined phone conversations. Tapes of those bits became auditions that catapulted Newhart into show biz, where, looking back, he suggested he had problems in his accounting career because his working credo ran toward phrases like “That’s close enough.”

Newhart had a lot of jokes like that, the kind that remain funny in perpetuity, and that was a good thing because popular culture has no freeze-frames. By the late ’60s, comedy, like rock ’n’ roll, was taking further turns, obligating comedians to decide whether, among other things, they would aim at an audience that wanted its language and subject matter more explicit.

“Around the time of Laugh-In in the late ‘60s,” said Newhart, who came from a small Midwestern town and raised his four children in the same Catholic faith with which he grew up, “there was a temptation to get blue. I never felt comfortable doing it.”

That kind of resistance curtailed some comedy careers. Newhart — like Tony Bennett, only sooner — parlayed the old school into even greater success.

He had done some movie acting and in 1972 he took a shot with the TV sitcom The Bob Newhart Show, playing psychologist Bob Hartley. There could hardly have been a better setup for a straight man, and since TV in those pre-cable days still adhered to strict family-friendly content guidelines, there was no question he would work clean.

A decade later, four years after The Bob Newhart Show ended, he pulled off the near-impossible trick of scoring with a second sitcom, this one just called Newhart. He played the same character, this time innkeeper and TV talk show host Dick Loudon. Once again he made the humor look easy.

The resonance of the second show is reflected in the fact that people who never watched it for a minute know how it ended. In the final episode, Newhart wakes up next to Suzanne Pleshette, who played his wife in the earlier show, and says, “You won’t believe the dream I just had.”

TV Guide called it the best finale ever. Newhart, in keeping with his deflect-the-credit approach, always said the idea came from his real-life wife Ginnie, to whom he was married for 60 years before her death in 2023.

Newhart kept a hand in TV for the rest of his life, including guest spots on shows like The Big Bang Theory. He kept doing live comedy shows, even as he acknowledged comedy had splintered and was no longer the kind of all-ages entertainment it was in 1960.

“Ninety percent of the storylines on Everybody Loves Raymond [launched in 1996], we couldn’t have done,” he said in 2014. “We would have sent them in, they would have sent them back with a laugh and said, ‘Okay, now send us the real script.’ “

One of the funny things about revolutions, though, is sometimes they can have a quiet and innocent facade.

One of Newhart’s early routines had him playing a TV kids’ show host who secretly couldn’t stand kids.

When one of the young guests doesn’t cooperate properly, Newhart’s host gently asks, “How old are you?. . . . Five? . . . . Would you like to see six?”

“All humor is subversive,” Newhart said in 2014. “Some of the things I say are outrageous. I could never say them in any other context.”

Viva la revolution.

With the passing of Bob Newhart, his generation of comics is now pretty much gone. They were a diverse and often neurotic bunch, which makes it perfect that Newhart walked among them, probably sometimes shaking his head even as he joined them in enhancing the quality and prominence of comedy as it marched into its next era.