Bob Newhart has died at age 94. The legendary comedian, whose TV series “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart” were hits in the 1970s and ’80s, died Thursday.
His longtime publicist Jerry Digney announced that he died of “a series of short illnesses,” according to a press release obtained by The Post.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Newhart began his career as a stand up comedian in the 1950s, after a stint in the army (he served from 1952 to ’54). He was known as “the funny guy in the barracks” during the Korean War, he told The Post in 2020.
When he was working in Chicago at an accounting job, he started making humorous phone calls to a friend to pass the time and sending the recordings to radio stations. This got Newhart noticed by James Conkling, the then-president of Warner Bros. Records. Conkling booked him in the Houston nightclub, the Tidelands, and recorded his performances.
His career took off when his comedy routine “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” won a Grammy Award as Album of the Year at the 1961 Grammys – becoming the first comedy album to win that honor.
“They didn’t even have a category for comedy at that time,” he recalled to The Post in 2020. “It beat out [Harry] Belafonte, Sinatra and an Elvis album [‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’] They kept calling my name and I kept walking up there and thanking them for the awards.”
It sold 750,000 copies at the time. That year, the New York Times called Newhart, “the first comedian in history to come to prominence through a recording.”
It’s since been added to the Library of Congress for its registry of historically significant sound recordings.
“I thought [‘The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart’] might sell maybe 5,000 albums. I would’ve been happy with that,” Newhart told The Post. “I really saw it as an adjunct to stand-up, to maybe get four or five more people to come [to a club] because they’d heard about that album.”
He added, “And then it exploded.”
In one of his jokes, he pretended to be advising Abraham Lincoln on how to improve the Gettysburg Address: “Say 87 years ago instead of fourscore and seven,” he said.
“The comedy clubs weren’t around then,” he recalled to The Post.
“There was a big sea change in comedy. There was Mike [Nichols] and Elaine [May], Shelley Berman, myself, Jonathan Winters and Lenny Bruce. We all kind of happened at the same time and the humor was different than the humor before that, when there were a lot of wife jokes . . . and they had no relevance to college kids who picked up these albums, which were about their fears and their concerns about life.”
He credited college students with his popularity.
“They would get the record albums and go to someone’s dorm room and get beer and pizzas and someone had a record player. Those were their nightclubs. I think they really created that demand.”
“I tend to find humor in the macabre. I would say 85% of me is what you see on the show. And the other 15% is a very sick man with a very deranged mind,” he told Los Angeles Magazine in 1990.
His Variety show, “The Bob Newhart Show,” premiered in 1961. Although it earned Emmy and Peabody awards, it got canceled after one season.
Newhart’s next series was more successful, as it ran from 1972 to 1978.
“Bob Newhart Show” was a sitcom following a Chicago psychologist (Newhart) who lived with teacher wife (Suzanne Pleshette) and had kooky patients and neighbors.
His next show was called “Newhart,” and it was also a hit, lasting for eight seasons on CBS. He played a New York writer who reopens a closed Vermont inn, surrounded by oddball locals.
Newhart also had the series “Bob,” in 1992 to ’93, and “George & Leo,” which ran from 1997 to ’98.
His film roles included “In and Out,” “Legally Blonde 2,” “Elf” and “Horrible Bosses,” and on the small screen more recently, he was in “The Librarians,” “ER” (for which he got an Emmy nomination), “The Big Bang Theory” and “Young Sheldon.”
Newhart had 10 Emmy nominations, and only 1 win, for “The Big Bang Theory.”
From 1964 until her death in 2023, Newhart was married to Virginia Quinn. The couple had four children: Robert, Timothy, Jennifer and Courtney.
Newhart was also famously friends with fellow comedian Don Rickles, who died in 2017 at 90.
Judd Apatow made the documentary “Bob and Don: A Love Story” about their friendship.
Newhart told The Post that Richard Pryor once confessed to him, “He looked up at me and said, ‘I stole your album. In Peoria [Illinois]. I went into a record store and put it in my jacket.’”
Newhart recalled replying, “I said, ‘Richard, I get a quarter an album.’ So he got a quarter from someone and gave it to me for my royalty.”
About “Elf,” Newhart said in a 2005 interview with PBS, “it was just a delightful experience … I went to see a private screening of it with some of my granddaughters, and they enjoyed it. But my daughters enjoyed it even more.”
When asked if he agreed to do the movie for his grandkids, Newhart told the outlet, “The kids had something to do with it. I mean, I liked the story anyway, and I liked playing it.”
Newhart also told PBS, “People more and more come up to me saying thank you for all the laughter. And my reaction is always the same. It was my pleasure. And that’s the truth.”
Newhart is survived by his four children and 10 grandchildren.
