Bob Newhart, the comedian whose laidback, deadpan delivery earned him the love of American audiences and the admiration of generations of stand-ups who came after him, has died. He was 94.
The “accountant-turned-entertainment icon,” as the statement from his longtime publicist Jerry Digney characterized him, died after “a series of short illnesses.” Digney hailed his death as the “end of an era in comedy.”
From the early 1960s through the late 1980s, Newhart starred on a series of beloved eponymous comedy shows, including the short-lived but celebrated variety series The Bob Newhart Show, a sitcom of the same name, and another sitcom called Newhart.
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Younger viewers got to know him better through his big-screen work, however, in Disney’s The Rescuers series and the Will Ferrell vehicle Elf, a project that he particularly enjoyed making.
“Without question, the part of Papa Elf outranks, by far, any role I may have ever played,” he told CNN last year.
But decades before Papa Elf and Bernard the mouse came along, there was The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, Newhart’s first comedy album, which became a sensation, selling more than one million copies after it was released in 1960 and vaulting him into the celebrity stratosphere.
“In one year, I went from doing a man-on-the-street show to six Ed Sullivan shows,” Newhart recalled in 2002.
The following year, Button-Down Mind won two Grammys—Best Album of the Year and Best New Artist, both historic firsts for comedy.
Newhart played a mild-mannered, gently befuddled everyman onstage, a comedy persona befitting a man who’d previously been a pencil-pusher in Chicago.
“His story is so interesting because he was an accountant and he wrote all these sketches,” filmmaker Judd Apatow told The Daily Beast of Newhart last year.
“He had a friend who worked at a radio station, and they let him record the sketches, and he got a record deal out of it. And then he had to perform them in front of an audience, but he’d never performed in front of an audience before!”
As his status grew, Newhart took on supporting parts in other films like 1970’s Catch-22, playing the timid Major Major Major Major (no typo there) in a stacked ensemble cast that included Alan Arkin, Anthony Perkins, and Art Garfunkel.
He also played roles in films like Cold Turkey (1971), In & Out (1997), and Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde (2003); hosted Saturday Night Live twice, in 1980 and 1995; and appeared on The Johnny Carson Show 17 times, guest-hosting thrice.
Perhaps his most off-the-wall gig, however, was as part of an extended, elaborate gag at the 2006 Emmy Awards, in which host Conan O’Brien used him as bait to blackmail the audience.
“Tonight I have placed beloved TV icon Bob Newhart in an airtight container,” O’Brien told the audience. “If the Emmys run one second over, Bob Newhart dies.”
