Bob Newhart: The Untold Story Of The Legendary Comedian

Stand-up comedy as we know it today — a single performer on a stage, delivering carefully written and rehearsed bits that point out the foibles and absurdities of life — virtually begins with Bob Newhart. In the early 1960s, the dry-witted, soft-spoken, stammering comedian delivered monologues in which he pretended to be on the phone with historical figures and cultural manipulators, garnering big laughs for his intelligent and subversive material. Newhart stayed at the top of the American comedy game for the better part of the 20th century, harnessing his persona and transforming himself into a sitcom star. His name appeared in the titles of two of the best-regarded TV comedies of all time: "The Bob Newhart Show" in the 1970s, and "Newhart" in the 1980s. Newhart helped flesh out the sitcom the same way he helped to define stand-up.

Newhart is an entertainment icon, and he's lived a fascinating if unlikely life. Here's a deep dive into the life, work, inspirations, and impact of Bob Newhart.

Bob Newhart, going by his first name of George, landed a job writing advertising copy at the Leo Burnett Agency in Chicago, alongside another young writer named Ed Gallagher. They both found the job utterly tedious. "To keep from going out of my mind, I'd call Ed, and we'd do improv routines over the phone. He'd interview me and play the straight man," Newhart told the Tampa Bay Times. "Then he said, 'Why don't we try to sell this to some radio stations?'" Newhart agreed, and after the rest of the ad agency staff would go home at night, they'd use the in-house studio. They taped about five of their bits as demos and mailed them unsolicited to 100 radio stations. Initially, three stations responded positively and put Newhart and Gallagher on the air: one each in Massachusetts, Florida, and Idaho. In "I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This!," Newhart recalled the stations paid him and Gallagher $7.50 each week to record five minutes of original material.

A few months after the duo gained a foothold, Gallagher quit, Newhart wrote. Unlike Newhart at the time, he had a family to support and accepted a well-paying position at a New York agency. That left Newhart a solo act.

The Grammy Awards would eventually evolve into one of the most prestigious honors in American arts and entertainment. The "Gramophone Awards" were created in 1958 to celebrate mature and established musical forms and industry achievement, a response to upstart rock 'n' roll, which bigwigs thought was a passing fad. As such, the early Grammy ceremonies honored whatever sold a lot of vinyl, and in the 1960s, Bob Newhart — a comedian, not a musician — was one of the recording industry's biggest superstars. In 1960, Bob Newhart released two full-length live comedy albums, "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart" and "The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!" The former spent 14 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart (and hung around for two years) and sold well over 600,000 copies; it would eventually rank among the 20 top-selling albums of all time in the U.S. The latter also topped the chart, which sent the first "Button-Down" to No. 2. For 30 weeks, Newhart albums filled those top two slots.

At the third annual Grammy Awards in 1961, honoring recordings released in 1960, Newhart earned nominations in three categories: best comedy performance – spoken word; best new artist; and album of the year (for "The Button-Down Mind"). He won all three, and as of 2023, he's still the only comedian (or non-musician) to win two of the most prestigious Grammys, the ones for best new artist and album of the year.

Around the time that backstage squabbles on "The Bob Newhart Show" led NBC to cancel the series in 1962 after its sole season, the network was left with a major personnel issue. Jack Paar, host of the network's signature late-night series, "The Tonight Show," abruptly resigned. Executives quickly narrowed down the search to four strong candidates, all well-known comedians and veteran TV stars – Groucho Marx, Jackie Gleason, Joey Bishop, and relative newcomer Bob Newhart. Instead, NBC hired a fifth candidate, less famous than all the others: Johnny Carson, host of the ABC game show "Who Do You Trust?"

While he missed out on the prestigious job as host of a late-night institution, Newhart would be a major presence on "The Tonight Show" for decades. Carson and Newhart became friends, and the comedian appeared as a guest on Carson's iteration of "Tonight" on more than 50 occasions. He was also one of Carson and NBC's go-to late-night guest hosts to fill in on vacation and sick days. In that capacity, Newhart served as host of "The Tonight Show" 87 times.

On "The Bob Newhart Show," main characters Bob and Emily Hartley (Newhart and Suzanne Pleshette) never had children, and that was upon the insistence of the man whose name was in the title. "I didn't want to be the dolt of a father who gets himself in trouble and then the precocious kids huddle in the kitchen and plot a way to get Dad out of this pickle," Newhart wrote in "I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This!" But in the fifth season of the show, producers told the show's writers to work out a storyline where Emily became pregnant. Newhart told producers that he thought the script was funny, then wryly asked, "Who are you going to get to play the part of Bob?" With the star of the show effectively nixing the idea, the pregnancy storyline was never explored; "The Bob Newhart Show" ended about a year later.

Bob Newhart celebrated his 93rd birthday in September 2022, and he's only recently slowed down on acting works and live comedy gigs, making him one of the oldest living actors in Hollywood today. And yet, Newhart nearly died prematurely, in his mid-50s, and in what would've been a darkly ironic way. On his 1962 album "The Button-Down Mind on TV," Newhart delivered "Introducing Tobacco to Civilization," a satirical and absurd anti-smoking monologue imagining English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh shipping tobacco from North America to Europe and explaining how to use it. Then in 1971, Newhart was part of the ensemble cast of Norman Lear's anti-smoking comedy film "Cold Turkey."

In his private life, however, Newhart was a longtime smoker. "The message of the movie didn't faze me a bit. I smoked during filming," he wrote in "I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This!" In the summer of 1985, after experiencing constant nosebleeds, Newhart took an ambulance to a Santa Monica, California, hospital where doctors diagnosed him with polycythemia secondary — he had so much nicotine in his system that his body produced too many red blood cells, triggering the nosebleeds. A physician told Newhart he could have easily and quickly died from the condition. That's when he finally quit smoking.

Bob Newhart is probably best known to younger audiences for his role as Arthur Jeffries, aka Professor Proton, the droll TV science show host who inspired Nobel Prize winner Sheldon Cooper. Newhart has played the role a total of nine times across both "The Big Bang Theory" and its prequel series "Young Sheldon." The part earned Newhart three Emmy Award nominations in the category of outstanding guest actor in a comedy series, and he won in 2013 for "The Big Bang Theory." That marked Newhart's first Emmy win and seventh overall nomination, with his first nod for writing on "The Bob Newhart Show" way back in 1962.

Not only was the trophy a long time coming, but so was the role of Professor Proton itself. "The Big Bang Theory" co-creator Chuck Lorre (who also worked on "Grace Under Fire," "Mike and Molly," and "Two and a Half Men") was persistent in trying to land a Newhart appearance. "We'd been trying to get together on one of his sitcoms, so he came to me one year, said, 'Well, I'm ready for my annual turn-down.' I said, 'No, I really like 'The Big Bang Theory' and I'd like to do just three shows,'" Newhart explained to VC Star. Newhart also demanded that he shoot his scenes with an audience. "To me, it's sterile to do it to a laugh track." Lorre then came back to Newhart with Professor Proton, a role he wrote especially for the actor.