Bob Newhart Critic’s Appreciation

In fitting Bob Newhart fashion, the legendary comic, who died this week at 94, liked to sell himself short.

In a 1986 Rolling Stone interview (conducted by future Law & Order boss Warren Leight!), Newhart referred to the secret sauce of his self-titled CBS sitcom as “Brevity. It’s saying it in the fewest number of words, and giving the audience some credit for being intelligent and being able to figure it out.”

Referring, later in the conversation, to his seminal early routine featuring a P.R. guy chatting with an unheard Abraham Lincoln on the phone and offering unsolicited notes on the Gettysburg Address, Newhart noted: “That Abe Lincoln routine is not funny on a piece of paper. It’s what isn’t said that’s funny.”

The Internet — source pending — also quotes Newhart summing up his overall persona with the observation, “I am a minimalist. I like saying the most with the least.”

There are books to be written pondering the truth of these self-estimations.

Surely the root of Newhart’s reputation as an Everyman comes from an image predicated on the mundane. The son of a plumber and a housewife, Newhart’s early life, such as it has become lore, is so full of “normal” that it borders on parody. He was drafted into the army, but served “only” as a clerk. He became an accountant, but not just an accountant, an accountant at a company manufacturing drywall — which is pretty much the drywall of accountants.

You may not know The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart from 1960, but you’ve heard it referenced on shows including The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Joel ripped it off, the only proof we ever needed that he was the worst) and Mad Men (Pete Campbell listened to it and, actually, he was the worst, too).

The album, which still plays tremendously well even in a world in which the concept of a “comedy record” is probably funnier than much of the genre, features that Lincoln routine and others like it, one-sided phone conversations in which Newhart plays the straight man to… nothing. One of my favorite details about Newhart’s early career is that he had a writing partner and they developed these phone sketches as two-handers, but when they split up, Newhart decided to continue doing the bits with… nobody.

On one hand, maybe the idea that Newhart had his comedy breakthrough doing literally half a routine confirms his diagnosis of “minimalism.” He isn’t wrong that the punchlines are technically on the other side of the phone, that Lincoln and his desire to rewrite “Four score and seven years ago” is the “funny” character and Newhart’s P.R. guy character is just being perplexed.

On the other hand? Nah. Let’s not let Newhart get away with that.

Let’s not let Newhart be valorized exclusively for his deadpan.

Let’s not let him be beloved exclusively for his stammer.

Let’s not merely classify him as an “Everyman.”

No, Newhart’s style was maximalism masked in minimalism, a hilarious straight man and an expert reactor who, at times, needed to only react to himself.

The trademark stammer was actually barely present in The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart and most of those phone characters were fairly excitable and not deadpan at all. What was evident even then was comic timing of astonishing precision, and comic timing of the most literal sort. Every second Newhart’s character waits in silence, in growing confusion and irritation, is a second that the audience has to wait for a punchline. More than that, it’s a second that the listener has to supply their own punchline. You might compare it to the old jazz cliché that it’s about the notes that aren’t played, but I think of it as closer to the technique of a suspense filmmaker like Alfred Hitchcock, but building to laughter instead of shock.

The stammer became more and more a part of his persona, and it was deployed in many of the same ways as the silence on the other end of the phone. Every hesitation, every restatement, every embarrassed pause forced the audience to wait another second for the joke that was his reaction and not even a punchline. The pauses became the punchline. The flustered uncertainty became the punchline. Newhart’s reputation as “a thinking man’s comic” was as much based on the sense of thought and discernment in his performance style as the wisdom of anything he said. This is a key thing that separates him from contemporaries like Woody Allen or Tommy Smothers, who were similar in some ways.

As Newhart brought his material from audio to television, every tiny gesture became a punchline. In that same Rolling Stone interview, he said, “I’m not that physical a comedian” — comparing himself to John Cleese — but that’s disingenuous, too. The immortal Bob Newhart exasperated shrug, the shifts in posture as chaos unfolded around him, the downward tug on his mouth as he tried in vain to keep his world-weary frustration to himself? If that’s not physical comedy, I don’t know what it is.

One self-description of Newhart’s persona that I like is “the last sane man on earth.” That, to me, is different from a simple Everyman and it’s why Newhart was such a great TV star, particularly on The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart.

In the former, he played a Chicago psychologist who — as befits a genre I refer to as the Vocational Irony Narrative — was as messed-up as his patients. In the latter, he played a newly arrived innkeeper in a Vermont town populated by eccentrics. In both sitcoms, he’s surrounded by colorful characters and scene-stealers, but every scene hinges on his character and his reactions. And in both cases, the shows are elevated by the surprising warmth and earnestness lurking under the unfurling agita.

As funny as some of those supporting characters are, you can still sit down and laugh — and laugh hard — at both shows today; whenever anything got too contrived or too out-of-control, Newhart was there to puncture the artificiality in the most precise way possible. I’m going to keep repeating “precise” and “precision,” because that’s honestly what I think Newhart meant by “brevity.” “Brevity” not in terms of “terseness,” but in terms of never letting a beat be wasted.

It was a not-so-secret superpower that continued even in less successful subsequent shows or in very successful subsequent shows on which he was “merely” a guest star. He won his only Emmy for his guest appearances on The Big Bang Theory, where his presence — in full deadpan/stammer mode — served two key purposes: leveling out the wacky hijinks from much of the cast and accentuating that, in some ways, Jim Parsons was his comic-timing heir.

Those Big Bang Theory cameos, and the affection with which Sheldon/Parsons treated him, helped introduce Newhart to several new generations with the adulation he deserved. You never would have known that for all that adulation, he’d lost a few Emmys for Newhart (to Michael J. Fox and Robert Guillaume, for which there’s no disgrace) and he was never even nominated for The Bob Newhart Show (though that was the era of Norman Lear comedies and The Odd Couple and M*A*S*H).

I’m sure that only contributed to his exaggerated humility. In his passing, though, let’s make it clear that we don’t buy any of it. Were you really an Everyman if you had a voice that has been imitated by countless performers over the decades and comic timing without parallel? Nothing minimal about it.