The comedian Bob Newhart, who has died aged 94, was both a legendary comic actor and one of the most beloved American public figures of the past century. His skill lay in finding unexpected and subversive twists on the everyday that could reduce his adoring audiences to helpless tears of laughter.
Nothing if not an innovator, he changed expectations of what comedy could be – and he did it all with his 1960 album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, which ran just short of 32 minutes and changed the face of recorded humour.
In 1958, the 29-year-old Newhart was unhappily employed as a copywriter in Chicago, working for the hard-nosed film producer Fred A Niles. Bored in his job, Newhart and one of his colleagues amused themselves by coming up with a routine where they would make increasingly outlandish pretend phone calls. Newhart and his colleague recorded themselves making these calls and tried to interest local radio stations in broadcasting them, but nobody found Newhart’s jokes as funny as he did, and so he seemed doomed to remain a copywriter.
He was – not for the last time in his career – then blessed with an extraordinary stroke of luck. The film studio Warner Brothers decided to diversify into records, and set up an album label, Warner Bros Records, that was initially designed to release soundtracks of songs from their films, but also encompassed spoken word LPs. After their first releases failed to make any significant impact, they were desperately looking for new performers, and Newhart’s friend, a Chicago DJ named Dan Sorkin, introduced him to some Warners executives. As Newhart later recalled, “Dan called me up. He said ‘Put what you have on tape and I’ll play it for them.’ So I put it on tape, brought it down there, and they listened to it. And they said ‘OK, OK, we’ll give you a recording contract and we’ll record your next nightclub [set].’” There was only one problem. Newhart had never played to a nightclub, or any other live audience before. However, Warners were unfazed by this revelation, and responded, “Well, we’ll have to get you into a nightclub.”
The first night that Newhart performed his newly created material at the Tidelands Club in Houston, Texas was a complete bust because he was too nervous to be able to put his jokes across. The second night was, if anything, worse, because a drunk woman kept loudly announcing “That’s a bunch of crap!” Finally, Newhart struck it lucky on the third night, managing to deliver six surreal short monologues, all of which are presented as one side of a telephone conversation, delivered by a put-upon straight man.
The first, funniest and most enduring – and Newhart’s own favourite – consists of a Mad Men type, an advertising executive from Madison Avenue, who is attempting to convince Abraham Lincoln not to update his image by shaving his beard off and changing the Gettysburg Address. The humour comes not only from the scripted material, which is itself very funny, but Newhart’s increasingly exasperated delivery, as his put-upon ad man tries to convince Lincoln not to attempt to do anything rash that will destroy his reputation. (“You’ve changed ‘four score and seven’ to ‘eighty-seven’?’”)
The other subjects lay somewhere between topical satire, à la Tom Lehrer, and timeless surreal observation, as Newhart delivered skits about everything from the possibility of merchandising the Wright Brothers’s aeronautical feats to a stressed television director wondering how best to deal with the arrival of the Russian president Nikita Khruschev in the United States. These sketches anticipated everything from Saturday Night Live to Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm in the way in which Newhart presented himself as a put-upon, rational but long-suffering figure who is surrounded by zany incompetents – a trope that could be seen everywhere in later comedy from Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier to, in this country, Father Ted and Fawlty Towers’ Basil Fawlty. Listening back, it’s possible to hear the audience’s gleeful surprise; they, and we, genuinely have never heard anything as groundbreakingly original as this before.
When the material was ready to release as an album, Newhart suggested that it should be called The Most Celebrated New Comedian Since Attila The Hun, but Warner Bros did not get the joke, and so the present title was suggested. It was released on August 1, 1960 and, helped by ecstatic reviews – the New York Times later called it “the first blockbuster special” – and gushing word of mouth, it went straight to the top of the Billboard chart, remaining there for the next six weeks. It sold 600,000 copies in total – an unprecedented amount for a spoken-word comedy album – and was later named Album of the Year at the 1961 Grammy Awards, where Newhart was also named Best New Artist, neither of which had ever happened before. The now-30 year old comedian had instant celebrity status conferred upon him, and he went on to make several more spoken word albums, all of which were similarly successful.
He was later awarded the Peabody Award, an accolade given to “the most powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories” in the media of television and radio, which praised him for how his “gentle satire and wry and irreverent wit waft a breath of fresh and bracing air through the stale and stuffy electronic corridors.” It is impossible, listening to what can only be described as one of the funniest novelty albums ever recorded, to disagree with this, or their conclusion that “Newhart has proved once again that laughter is the best medicine.”
The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart has not dated at all, but proves, definitively, that truly great comedy endures. Newhart has died one of America’s greatest, and most-loved comedians, and his fame and reputation owes its origins to the night that a nervous, untested figure stood up in a Houston nightclub, pretended to pick up a telephone – and changed the face of comedy.
2024-07-19T13:16:13Z dg43tfdfdgfd