Six classic Bob Newhart performances

Salute to the American comedy great after he dies at 94

After Bob Newhart’s death at the age of 94, we revisit some of the classic moments that kept him at the forefront of comedy for almost 60 years...

Nobody Will Ever Play Baseball

From his breakthrough 1960 album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, which remained at the top of the Billboard charts for 14 weeks and becoming the first comedian to win the Album Of The Year Grammy. The only on the comic to achieve that feat was impressionist Vaughn Meader two years later with The First Family, a good-natured parody of the Kennedies.

In this track, Newhart plays an Olympic Games worker on a phone call to the inventor of a new game called baseball, which he tries to get his head around.

Introducing Tobacco to Civilisation

As performed on TV in the early 1960s and featured on his 1962 album, The Button-Down Mind On TV. The comedian plays an Elizabethan courtier receiving a phone call from Sir Walter Raleigh from the colonies with news of what he’s about to bring back.

The Bob Newhart Show

Newhart was a stalwart of comedy on the CBS network in the States: starring as Chicago psychologist Robert Hartley on The Bob Newhart Show from 1972 to 1978 and then as Vermont innkeeper Dick Loudon on series Newhart from 1982 to 1990. The 1975 episode Over The River And Through The Woods is often cited as one of the funniest Thanksgiving specials in American TV history.

Hosting Saturday Night Live

The monologue from the episode he hosted in February 1995:

Elf

Newhart became known to a new generation of fans when he Papa Elf to Will Ferrell’s naive Buddy in the 2003 Christmas movie. Speaking in November to mark the comedy’s 20th anniversary, Newhart said: ‘Without question, the part of Papa Elf outranks, by far, any role I may have ever played.’

The Big Bang Theory

Incredibly, Newhart won just one Emmy – and late in his career, in 2013 – for his guest performance on The Big Bang Theory as Arthur Jefferies, aka Professor Proton, who appeared as the former children's science show host or as Sheldon's ghostly Jedi advisor.

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Published: 19 Jul 2024