There are 6 great Bob Newhart performances
The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart: The Everyman’s Everyman Was Always A Gentle, Gentle, and Efficient Actor
He was a soft person before inventing the hit stand-up special with the 1960 Grammys-winning album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart”. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.
It’s easy to forget how unlikely Bob Newhart was to become one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy after he died at the age of 94.
That story is exaggerated. Newhart had a career in advertising that ran longer than he did in accounting. It is true, though, that Newhart rocketed to the top because of his innate knowledge of a type of Middle American man called the Everyman, which can be overwhelmed by a world that sometimes seems weird.
He had retired by the 21st century, so he did his beloved shtick of doing supporting roles in movies and TV. Here are six of Newhart’s most memorable performances, all available to stream:
He did not curse, bust taboos or show anger on stage. His style was gentle and wry. As opposed to motormouth contemporaries like Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl, his defining trait was a cheerful, sloth-paced delivery, stammering, pausing, gradually, meticulously working his way through a sentence. He belonged to neither of the great branches of American humor — the legacies of Jewish or Black comedy. A Roman Catholic from the west side of Chicago, Newhart came off as an entirely respectable example of Midwestern nice.
