Bob Newhart, comedian who reduced Princess Margaret to tears with his deadpan monologues – obituary
Bob Newhart, who has died aged 94, was the first American comedian to win fame through long-playing records featuring deadpan monologues that reflected wry bewilderment at everyday aspects of 20th-century life.
To his many British admirers, Newhart was the antithesis of the American stereotype: thoughtful, understated, apologetic, courteous, slightly hesitant.
One of his best-known droll disquisitions was “The Driving Instructor” which, like many of his set-pieces, fell resonantly on British ears: “How do you do, you are Mrs Webb, is that right? Oh, I see you’ve had one lesson already. Who was the instructor on that, Mrs Webb? Mr Adams. I’m sorry, here it is: Mr Adams. Just let me read ahead to kind of familiarise myself with the case. How fast were you going when Mr Adams jumped from the car? 75! And where was that? In your driveway! How far had Mr Adams got in the lesson? Backing out, I see, you were backing out at 75 and that’s when he jumped.”
Newhart’s dry, mordant humour, wafting from the Dansette record players of the day or from radios that many still thought of as wirelesses, caught the nervy tenor of the times, but it was just as effective when applied to historical characters, perhaps never more so than in an imaginary telephone conversation between Sir Walter Raleigh and the non-comprehending head of the West India Company in England on the subject of Raleigh’s new discovery, tobacco:
You can chew it! …
Or put it in a pipe! …
Or you can shred it up …
And put it in a piece of paper. Ha! Ha! Ha! …
And roll it up… Ha! Ha! Ha! …
Don’t tell me, Walt, don’t tell me. Ha! Ha! Ha! … You stick it in your ear, right? Ha! Ha! Ha! …
Oh! Between your lips! …
Then what do you do, Walt? Ha! Ha! Ha! …
You set fire to it! Ha! Ha! Ha! …
Margaret Thatcher chose this track among her selections on Desert Island Discs.
Newhart’s subtle, low-key and off-the-cuff style struck a chord with anyone who had ever tried to catch a bus (in one of his routines, bus drivers are taught to pull away from the kerb as little old ladies hobble up at the double), or had tried to teach a woman to drive a car (he subtitled his driving instructor routine “the world’s most daring profession”).
In the mid-1970s, during a British tour, he famously reduced Princess Margaret to tears at a gala performance at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane. But although much of his material had transatlantic appeal, it was Americans who recognised Newhart’s deadly satirical bite, when he dilated on such subjects as Tarzan and Jane, Right-wing bigots, all-powerful labour unions and America’s restrictive immigration policies.
George Robert Newhart was born on September 5 1929 in Chicago, where his father, a heating engineer, was part-owner of a plumbing and heating supply business. He had three sisters, one of whom became a nun and taught chemistry at a local high school.
At St Ignatius High, young Bob acted in school plays and entertained his classmates with imitations of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Durante.
Having studied accountancy, in 1952 he graduated from Loyola University in Chicago with a BSc in Commerce and went into the US Army, spending his two years of military service keeping personnel records.
Returning to Loyola, he enrolled in law school but dropped out after six months and began a series of jobs as a copywriter, a clerk in a cigar store, a state unemployment office and – finally – what he described as “a maladjusted accountant who used to make the petty cash come out all right by digging down into his own pocket”.
To relieve the boredom, in his spare time Newhart acted in a suburban theatrical company. He and his friend Ed Gallagher also amused themselves by making lengthy and antic telephone calls to each other, with the idea of selling recordings of them to radio stations as a way of breaking into show business.
Although the plan fell through, Gallagher had recorded some of Newhart’s monologues on a home tape machine and sent them to a Chicago disc jockey, Dan Sorkin, who found them hilarious.
One concerned the rookie security guard at the Empire State Building who telephones his boss on the night King Kong climbs up it. “Well, sir,” the guard stammers, “I think he’s about 17 or 18 storeys high, depending on whether we have a 13th floor.”
On the strength of three of his monologues, Warner Brothers Records signed Newhart and booked him to appear at a nightclub in Houston, Texas. During his two-week residency in February 1960, six of Newhart’s routines were recorded “live” and released on April Fools’ Day as the album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. When the record immediately vaulted into the charts, Newhart made several network television appearances and, almost overnight, became America’s most talked-about comedian.
Uncomfortable in cabaret – the drunks, he complained, interrupted his flow – Newhart also had misgivings about becoming over-exposed on television, but in 1961 NBC made him an offer he was unable to refuse: his own networked weekly half-hour show. But within a few months, The Bob Newhart Show had run into difficulties, writers and producers left, and the sponsor withdrew. Although it was pulled after a single season, the show was nominated for an Emmy award.
Later Newhart became a regular guest star on The Dean Martin Show (24 times) and The Ed Sullivan Show (eight times), guest-hosting The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on 87 occasions. In the 1970s, in a revived Bob Newhart Show for CBS, he played a psychologist, with Suzanne Pleshette as his wife, and in 1983 returned to prime time with a new sitcom, Newhart.
His later ventures into television were not successful: in 1993 his sitcom Bob, about a cartoonist, was cancelled during its second season, and in 1997 a show called George and Leo was scrapped before the end of its first season. More recently, however, he won the affection of a younger generation of viewers – and an Emmy – as Professor Proton in the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2013-2018).
Newhart’s film credits included Don Siegel’s Hell Is for Heroes (1962) and his portrayal of Major Major Major in the 1970 film of Catch-22. The film role for which he will probably be best remembered, through annual television repeats, is that of Will Ferrell’s adoptive father Papa Elf in the 2003 Christmas comedy Elf.
Interviewed by CNN for the film’s 20th anniversary, Newhart said: “Without question, the part of Papa Elf outranks, by far, any role I may have ever played.” He knew when he saw the script that Elf was destined to be “another Miracle on 34th Street”.
Newhart won many show business awards, including three Grammys in 1961.
Many of his later albums sold well in Britain, including Behind The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart (1961), The Button-Down Mind on TV (1962) and The Best of Bob Newhart (1971).
His last British tour was in November 1999, when Newhart celebrated 40 years on stage. “The last time I appeared in London was 25 years ago,” he noted. “Somebody must have liked me and said we must have this guy back soon.”
His autobiography, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This, appeared in 2006.
Bob Newhart married, in 1963, Virginia Quinn, who died in April 2023. Their four children survive him.
Bob Newhart, born September 5 1929, died July 18 2024