Stand-up comedian and sitcom legend was 94

Robert Newhart

Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Bob Newhart, the beloved stand-up comedian whose dry, deadpan humor catapulted him into the ranks of history’s greatest comedians on two critically acclaimed CBS sitcoms, died Thursday morning. He was 94.

The Chicago legend who won Grammy Awards for Album of the Year and Best New Artist for her groundbreaking 1960 album The conservative spirit of Bob Newhartdied at his home in Los Angeles after a series of brief illnesses, his longtime publicist Jerry Digney announced.

The former accountant famously remained without an Emmy Award until 2013, when he finally received one for his guest appearance as Arthur Jeffries (aka Professor Proton, former host of a children’s science show) on the CBS show “The Last Man.” The big Bang Theory.

In 1972, MTM Enterprises cast the humble comedian in the role of clinical psychologist Bob Hartley, who in real life practiced in Newhart’s favorite city, Chicago. The Bob Newhart Show would go on to become one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, with a great supporting cast including Suzanne Pleshette, Peter Bonerz, Marcia Wallace, Bill Daily and Jack Riley.

Newhart ended the series in 1978 after 142 episodes — and, incredibly, with no Emmy nominations for him and no awards for the show — because he felt the series had played its tricks. But in 1982, he returned to CBS to host another MTM comedy.

In Newharthe portrayed Dick Loudon, a New York writer who became the owner of the Stratford Inn in Vermont. The show ran for eight seasons and again featured a great cast (Mary Frann, Tom Poston – who would later marry Pleshette -, Julia Duffy, Peter Scolari, and as support staff “Larry, Darryl and their other brother Darryl,” William Sanderson, Tony Papenfuss and John Voldstad).

In one of the most admired series endings in history Newhart ended its eight seasons with a cheeky final scene in which Loudon wakes up in the middle of the night as Bob Hartley in bed with Pleshette in their Chicago apartment, implying that his entire second season was a dream.

Newhart’s trademarks included his pauses and stuttering, and his wry remarks were the result of his observant nature.

“I find the macabre funny. I would say 85 percent of me is what you see on the show. And the other 15 percent is a very sick man with a very disturbed mind,” he said in a 1990 interview with Los Angeles Magazine.

He was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame in 1992.

George Robert Newhart was born on September 5, 1929, in Oak Park, Illinois. He grew up a Cubs fan and attended the team’s victory parade down La Salle Street after Chicago won the National League championship in 1945. (He was, of course, thrilled when the Cubs ended their 108-year World Series drought with a win in 2016.)

Newhart never dreamed of working in show business. In fact, such a flashy profession was not at all compatible with his personality as a Midwesterner, and perhaps that was the reason why he was able to connect with middle class America.

After attending St. Ignatius College Prep and then earning a commerce degree from Loyola University, Newhart spent two years in the Army and then dropped out of law school, working as a bookkeeper for U.S. Gypsum and later for the Glidden Co., which sold paint.

“Somehow there’s a connection between numbers, music and comedy. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s there,” he once said in an interview with a university economics professor. “I know that with a comedian it’s like 2 and 2 equals 5. You take this fact and you take that fact and you come up with this ridiculous fact.”

To combat boredom at work, Newhart and a friend made prank calls to pass the time. He refined this into what was then his most famous comedic trick: a one-sided phone conversation (the audience was allowed to imagine what the other side of the conversation looked like).

He and his buddy also sold a syndicated radio show where they did five-minute comedy performances five days a week for $7.50 a week.

In 1959, another friend who worked as a disc jockey in Chicago introduced Newhart to an executive at Warner Bros. Records. The accountant-turned-lyricist only had three programs at the time, but he brought more material and landed a contract with the record company.

“Remember, when I started out in the late 1950s, I didn’t say to myself, ‘Oh, there’s a big gap to fill here – I’m going to be a balding ex-accountant who specialises in subtle humour,'” he said. “That was just who I was, and that was the direction my mind always went, so it was natural for me to be that way.”

The conservative spirit of Bob Newhartrecorded live in a Houston nightclub, was the first comedy album to top the album charts and sold 1.5 million copies. It was one of the best-selling “talk” albums. The tracks included such classics as “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” and “Driving Instructor.”

At a time when controversial, harder-hitting comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl were on the rise, The button-down spirit also earned Newhart a third Grammy for Best Comedy Performance. Suddenly he was booked for The Ed Sullivan Show.

After two more successful albums, Newhart was offered a weekly TV variety series for the 1961-62 season. The first The Bob Newhart Show won an Emmy for Outstanding Program Achievement of the Year in Humor and a Peabody Award.

Newhart, however, soon became exhausted. “I took full responsibility for the program, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, even though we had an excellent production team,” he once said.

He was offered a number of sitcoms, but turned them down, returned to the nightclubs and honed his acting skills with guest appearances on television and in films, starting with Don Siegel’s Hell is for heroes (1962) with Steve McQueen in the lead role, and then in other films such as Hot millions (1968), Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 (1970) and Norman Lear’s Cold turkey (1971).

Newhart Show Co-creators Dave Davis and Lorenzo Music have wanted to collaborate on the comic for some time.

“Lorenzo and I wrote an article for Bob about Love the American style. Bob was unavailable. So we brought in Sid Caesar. A few years later we wrote a script for Bob for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Bob was unavailable again,” said Davis THR in an oral history of the sitcom. “After we became story editors for Mary’s show, MTM Enterprises decided to branch out and asked Lorenzo and I to do a pilot. We knew exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted a show with Bob.”

Newhart said: “Arthur Price (co-founder of MTM) was my manager. He asked me if I would be interested. I had been doing stand-up for 12 years, mostly one-night shows where you’re somewhere 5,300 miles away the next day. I wanted a normal life where I could be at home with my family.

“I didn’t have any great expectations. I just didn’t want the show to be about the father being a jerk that everyone loves, who gets himself into a bind and then his wife and kids cobble together to get him out of it.”

In 1992 he started another new series, bobplayed a cult comic book artist, but never found an audience. George and Leoin which he played a bookseller alongside Judd Hirsch.

Newhart appeared on NBC’s HE He played a doctor suffering from macular degeneration in three episodes (which earned him another Emmy nomination) and played Morty Flickman, the husband of Lesley Ann Warren’s character, in the ABC series Desperate Housewives.

More recently, Newhart Judson played on a trio of The Librarians TV movies and then a series for TNT.

Newhart also played in Little Miss Marker (1980); as President in Buck Henry’s First family (1980), with Gilda Radner as his playful daughter; as Papa Elf in Will Ferrell’s Eleven (2003); and in Horrible bosses (2011). He brought his flat Midwestern cadence to the vocal work of two savior Movies.

Chicago honored Newhart with a statue on Michigan Avenue, near the office building that was featured in the opening credits of The Bob Newhart Showwith his likeness in an armchair and an empty psychiatrist’s couch next to him. It was later moved to Navy Pier.

In 2002, he was the fifth recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and published his memoirs four years later. I shouldn’t even do that.

Newhart was married to Virginia “Ginny” Quinn (the daughter of character actor Bill Quinn) from January 1963 until her death in April 2023 at the age of 82. Comedian Buddy Hackett set them up on a blind date (Ginnie babysat Hackett’s children).

“Buddy came back one day and said in his inimitable way, ‘I met this young guy, his name is Bobby Newhart, he’s a comedian and he’s Catholic, and you’re Catholic, and I think maybe you should get married,'” she recalled in a 2013 interview.

She was the one who came up with the idea for the brilliant ending of the Newhart Show during a Christmas party, which Pleshette also happened to attend.

The Newharts were close friends with Don Rickles and his wife Barbara, and the couples often vacationed together.

He leaves behind his children Robert Jr., Timothy, Courtney and Jennifer and 10 grandchildren.