Comedian Bob Newhart, the sardonic king of phone monologues and comedies, passes away at the age of 94.

Bob Newhart, the sardonic accountant-turned-comedian who shot to fame with a timeless comedy CD, has away at the age of 94. He was one of the most well-liked TV personalities of his generation.
Publicist Jerry Digney reports that after many brief hospitalizations, actor Newhart passed away in Los Angeles on Thursday.

In the late 1950s, Newhart began his career as a stand-up comedian. Today, he is most known for being the lead character in two successful television series that held his name in the 1970s and 1980s. When his performance was recorded on vinyl in 1960 and named “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” it became well-known throughout the country and won the Grammy Award for album of the year.
Newhart stood apart from the other comedians of the day, such as Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Alan King, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May, who were often laughed at for their strong take on contemporary morality. Though he had a contemporary viewpoint, he seldom spoke louder than a tentative, even stammering delivery. The only prop he had was a phone, which he pretended to be talking to someone on the other end of the line.
In a standout spoof, he played a Madison Avenue image-maker who pushed Abraham Lincoln to adhere to the speechwriters’ original text of the Gettysburg Address rather than making changes.
“You adjusted 7 to 87 and 4 to score?” Newhart asks, astonished. “That’s supposed to be a grabber, Abe. It’s akin to Mark Antony stating, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, let me tell you something.”
Another one of his favorites was “Merchandising the Wright Brothers,” where he admitted that the distance of their first flight may be a barrier to the aviation pioneers’ attempts to found an airline.
“You know, having to land every 105 feet is going to make it harder for us to get to the coast.”
At first, Newhart was hesitant to commit to a weekly TV show because he thought it would overexpose his content. Nevertheless, he turned down an alluring offer from NBC, and on October 11, 1961, “The Bob Newhart Show” made its debut. The half-hour variety program, which won Peabody and Emmy awards but was discontinued after one season, served as a source of material for Newhart jokes for decades later.
Before doing another “Bob Newhart Show” in 1972, he waited ten years. In this situation comedy, Newhart portrayed a Chicago psychologist who lived in a penthouse with his wife, Suzanne Pleshette, a schoolteacher. The eccentric, neurotic group of people that made up their neighbors and his patients—most famously, airplane navigator Bill Daily—were the perfect foil for Newhart’s sardonic observations.
One of the most popular programs of the 1970s, it aired till 1978.
The comedian debuted a new program, just titled “Newhart,” four years later. This time, he was a well-known author from New York who made the decision to revive a long-closed inn in Vermont. Once again, Newhart was the cool, collected guy in the middle of an oddball bunch of locals. Once again, the program was a big success and ran on CBS for eight seasons.
In 1990, everything came to an unforgettable end when Newhart, in the guise of his former Chicago psychologist persona, awoke in Pleshette’s bed and wept as he related the bizarre dream he had had: “I was an innkeeper in this crazy little town in Vermont.” The three woodsmen appeared, but only one of them spoke, and the handyman continued to overlook the bigger picture.
The prank mocked a scene from a “Dallas” episode in which a major character was killed off and then brought back to life when it was discovered that the death had been a dream.
Two subsequent television shows, “Bob” (1992–1993) and “George & Leo” (1997), were comparatively terrible. Despite several nominations, he only received one Emmy nomination for a guest appearance on “The Big Bang Theory.” “Perhaps they believe that I’m not acting. That’s just Bob being Bob,” he groaned, lamenting his lack of success in earning the biggest prize on television in his prime.
Additionally, throughout the years, Newhart made many film appearances, most of them in humorous roles. Among them are the films “Catch 22,” “In and Out,” “Legally Blonde 2,” and “Elf,” in which the tiny father of Will Ferrell, the adoptive full-size son, appears. The TV shows “The Librarians,” “Horrible Bosses,” and “Young Sheldon,” a spin-off of “The Big Bang Theory,” were among the more recent works.
In 1964, Newhart wed Virginia Quinn, also referred to as Ginny by her friends, and they stayed together until her death in 2023. Courtney, Jennifer, Timothy, Robert, and Jennifer were their four children. As a regular guest of Johnny Carson, Newhart loved to make fun of the three-time divorced host of “Tonight,” suggesting that not all comedians were able to maintain long-term relationships. Don Rickles, a fellow comic and family guy, with rowdy insult comedy that contrasted notably with Newhart’s deadpan understatement, with whom he was particularly close.
We are dissimilar fruits. He is a Catholic, and I am a Jew. In 2012, Rickles told Variety, “He’s laid back, but I’m a yeller.” A decade later, in the little documentary “Bob and Don: A Love Story,” Judd Apatow would honor their relationship.
Expert in the subtly ironic comment, Newhart entered the comedy business after becoming disenchanted with his $5-per-hour accounting job in Chicago. He started making goofy phone calls to his buddy Ed Gallagher as a way to kill time. They ultimately made the decision to turn them into comedic routines that they could sell to radio stations.
Despite the failure of their attempts, Warner Bros. heard about the albums and signed Newhart to a record deal, getting him into a Houston club in February 1960.
In 2003, he recounted, “A terrified 30-year-old man walked out on the stage and played his first nightclub.”
Over the course of his two-week engagement, six routines were recorded, and on April Fools’ Day 1960, the album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” was published. “The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!” was the next book to come out after it sold 750,000 copies. The albums were placed No. 1 and No. 2 on the sales rankings at one time. He was dubbed “the first comedian in history to come to prominence through a recording” by the New York Times in 1960.
Not only did Newhart win album of the year for his debut, but he also took home the best new artist Grammy in 1960 for his work “The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!” and the best comedy spoken word album Grammy for it.
Newhart had many performances scheduled on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” as well as engagements at colleges, nightclubs, and music halls throughout the nation. But the heckling drunks that the clubs drew made him detest them.
In 1960, he observed, “It kills the routine every time I have to step out of a scene and put one of those birds in his place.”
He was nominated for another Emmy in 2004; this time, it was for a drama series guest acting performance in “E.R.” In 2007, the Library of Congress announced that “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” had been included to its list of historically important sound recordings, which was another accolade bestowed upon him.
With the release of his book “I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This!” in 2006, Newhart hit the bestseller charts. For his reading of the book, he received a second Grammy nomination for best spoken word album (a category that covers audio books).
“My work has always been compared to the guy who believes he is the only sane person on Earth—the Paul Revere of psychotics—who runs around the town screaming, ‘This is insane.’ However, nobody gives him any attention,” Newhart wrote.
A German-Irish family named Newhart gave him the name Bob at birth to distinguish him from his father, George Robert Newhart, who was also named George.
He entertained classmates in Chicago’s St. Ignatius High School and Loyola University by imitating James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Durante, and other celebrities. Newhart spent two years in the Army after his graduation with a degree in business. After serving in the military, he returned to Chicago and enrolled in Loyola Law, where he ultimately failed out. Eventually, he was hired by the state unemployment agency as an accountant. He was so bored with his job that he spent his weekends acting at a suburban Oak Park stock business, which is how the phone parts came about.
As Newhart put it in his book, “I wasn’t part of some comic cabal.” Let’s modify comedy and slow it down, but none of us—Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Shelley Bertman, Lenny Bruce, Johnny Winters, and Mort Sahl—got together to suggest that. It was simply our sense of humor. When they heard mother-in-law jokes, college students would ask themselves, “What the hell is a mother-in-law?” Our actions were a reflection of our life and connected to theirs.
After his fourth sitcom concluded, Newhart kept making appearances on television on occasion and promised in 2003 to keep working as long as he could.
“It would be like something was missing to quit; it’s been so much of my life, 43 years,” he said.

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