Why Newhart Still Wants to Make the World Laugh

[Zoneboy]

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When Bob Newhart turns 80 next year, he probably won't even pause in his schedule of stand-up dates, acting work and book tours.

"I always said that the alternative was Sunset Boulevard -- me watching old episodes of the Bob Newhart Show, with Erich von Stroheim coming in," the avuncular comic says over the phone from his Los Angeles home. "I started in stand-up and I can't ever imagine not doing it. What if I think of a routine -- am I going to do it for the dog? I'm always working, I've got the antenna up."

Newhart found stand-up fame in the 1950s with narrative-driven routines that generally had him playing a character at one end of a conversation -- a timid scientist recounting his experiences among free-living natives, a British courtier listening to Sir Walter Raleigh describe tobacco-smoking, a bus-driving instructor.

His style translated easily to TV, with four years in the early 1970s of the sitcom The Bob Newhart Show, followed by seven years of Newhart in the 1980s and a season of Bob in 1992. His big-screen roles included one as Will Ferrell's elf adoptive father in 2003's Vancouver-filmed Elf. His latest comedy album I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This! was nominated for a Grammy in 2007.

Off-screen, though, he keeps it down low.

"I was in Borders bookstore here in L.A. and a guy walked by me in line and said 'You sure look like him.' I said 'Yeah, I've been told that.' So he got in line behind me and he said 'Is he still alive?' I said, 'Yeah, I read it somewhere recently.'

"I'm not lying. Sometimes I tell people, 'He really screwed up my life.'"

Newhart is a frequent guest on his friend Ellen DeGeneres' TV talk show, and she has often acknowledged Newhart as an influence on her early comedy.

"I'm glad that maybe I helped somebody get into the business," he says. "You tend to hide behind people until you develop your own voice. She hid behind me for a couple of years. It's like giving back -- I watched Jack Benny, Fred Allen, George Goebel.

"It is kind of terrifying the first couple of times you walk on stage. You're not a singer or a dancer. The implicit contract with the audience is, I want to make you laugh. So you tend to be somebody else, so it isn't you that they're not laughing at, it's the other person. Then gradually you let your own voice sneak out a little more."

Newhart's gentle comic style couldn't be further from the caustic humour of his pal Don Rickles, whom he joined for the Emmy-winning TV special Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project.

"He's actually the exact opposite of what he appears onstage, he's very sensitive," says Newhart, adding that they never worry about either guy stealing the other's lines. "He wouldn't know how to do my material and I wouldn't want his, that's what our friendship is all about."

Newhart is in talks to start yet another TV project, this one a series of 90-minute TV movies, a comic murder mystery "kind of like Columbo only with comedy."

On stand-up dates like this one in Vancouver, Newhart mixes in some new material with a selection of his classic routines. "That's why some people show up -- I do one or two of the old classics. If you didn't do 'The Driving Instructor,' it's kind of like Tony Bennett not doing 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco.'"

[catlover79]

Thanks for sharing! Bob Newhart is, was, and always will be a timeless treasure.