NEWHART BUTTONED DOWN
Comedy legend Bob Newhart … he … has hung up aged 94. He landed on the scene with his acclaimed 1960 album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, which featured skits such as a driving instructor struggling with a reckless student, and Abe Lincoln rebuffing a slick ad man while he writes the Gettysburg Address. Newhart’s low-key, deadpan stammering style was ahead of his time and he frequently used a telephone as his only prop to hold faux conversations.
He was best known for multiple sitcoms in his name that utilised the “sane one in a sea of nutters” formula. His most acclaimed was The Bob Newhart Show, part of the MTM 70s empire where his psychiatrist Bob Hartley was straight man to a colourful backing cast that included Suzanne Pleshette as his wife, Bill Daily as his nosy neighbour, Peter Bonerz (fnarr) as his orthodontist coworker, Marcia Wallace as the receptionist, and Jack Riley as a cranky patient. He came back to sitcom-dom in the 80s with Newhart, where he played an innkeeper and had a wholly different supporting cast. It had perhaps the greatest series finale where Newhart awakens in bed with Suzanne Pleshette and Newhart was all a dream!
His subsequent sitcom attempts were flops, but he continued to find new audiences into the new millennium such as Papa Elf in Elf and Professor Proton in Bazingaland. Off the screen he was long a close friend of Don Rickles, despite their diametrically opposite comedic styles! After being a moderately popular pick for years, Newhart’s driving student pumped the gas and crashed right into the Drop 40 walls, with pickers including Bladerunner, JoeRam, and Pearly Gates.
Bob Newhart
5 September 1929 – 18 July 2024, aged 94
31 TEAMS (💀💀💀💀💀 + 40 = 8 POINTS)