Bob Newhart
Rest in Peace
1929-2024
We lost a wonderful man this past week: comedian Bob Newhart passed at the age of 94. Newhart built a 60-year career making us laugh in a way that avoided the course, uncivil ad hominem themes of many of today’s comedians (and is therefore much harder to pull off) .
In addition to a great career as a stand-up performer he starred in two hit sitcom series “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart.” (The latter had one of the best endings in TV history by creatively linking the two shows he starred in.)
He had several careers before finding his calling in comedy. He once shared that he realized his job as a clerk at the Illinois Unemployment Office had no future because he was getting $60 per week (in the 1950s) for showing up five days a week and the applicants were getting $55 for showing up once! He also had a stint as an accountant at the now defunct Arthur Andersen. In an early comedy routine, he explained why he left accounting behind:
“My theory of accounting was that as long as you got within two or three bucks of it, you were all right. But that didn’t catch on … I had to balance the petty cash with the slips—every time you give out money you had to get a slip. It had to balance. Well, I’d be there for three or four hours trying to figure out where the last dollar or dime went to. So finally, I’d just take it out of my pocket, and I’d put it in. If there were two dollars leftover, I’d take it out …And they told me you can’t do that. I said, ‘you’re paying me five dollars an hour to find two cents—it doesn’t make sense.’ So , I wasn’t a very good accountant.”
He leaves behind a large body of work over a six-decade career that we can continue to enjoy in various formats. I’ll close this tribute by sharing one of my favorites in which he wondered what Abraham Lincoln’s press agent, if he had one, would have advised our 16th president.
