As a purely serendipitous happening, one of our channel surfing expeditions while in Chicago landed us on an extended biography of the career of comedian Bob Newhart. Fans of the funnyman know that he comes from the Windy City, and yet this seemed to be a national, rather than local, broadcast. Just a lucky coincidence, I guess.
I was a fairly devoted fan of the 1970s sitcom, the Bob Newhart Show, in which he played psychologist Bob Hartley. Being a pre-teen and then teenager during its run, the wacky patients that Bob was visited by each week were probably the biggest draw for me at the time. Years later, watching it in re-runs, I loved the satire that they worked into each show, as well as the marriage-of-equals that existed between Bob and Emily. Most sitcoms, then and now, tend to portray the husband as the butt of all jokes, and the wife as long-suffering, or possibly just window dressing. Here, for once, was a loving couple whose lives didn't revolve around children - they'd chosen not to have any - and who respected each other, for all that they might spar from time to time.
When Newhart launched in 1982, this time serving up Bob as a Vermont innkeeper, I was less devoted to the show. I've probably seen most of the episodes, but I tended to drift in and out from season to season, depending on how interesting the supporting cast proved to be. Certainly, if nothing else is remembered from its 7-year run, Newhart's provided at least two sublimely hilarious additions to the TV sitcom annals: "Hi, I'm Larry, and this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl" and the final scene from the series.
For anyone who's managed to never hear the story before, Newhart closed out its run with an episode in which innkeeper Newhart and his wife, played by Mary Frann, decided to sell their property to a set of Japanese investors. It seemed as though everything had wrapped up quite nicely, and then the show returned from its final commercial break, to a darkened set. A bedroom light was turned on, and the studio audience - along with the viewing public - gasped upon realizing that Bob was in bed with Emily once more (a frequently-used setting from the previous Bob Newhart Show)! Bob proceeded to wake Emily up to tell her about the crazy dream he had just had, in which he'd been running a Vermont inn, hired a handyman who never seemed to make any sense, and had to deal with these three strange brothers... Poking fun at the then-current events of Dallas, in which one season was completely obliterated by use of an "it was just a dream!" opening, Newhart and his writing staff bottled all of their most recent adventures into a framing sequence supplied by the earlier show. Pure genius!
As was noted in the biography, the notion of a stand up comedian having not one but two hit TV series, each lasting a half dozen seasons or more, was unheard of at the time. (And we tend to forget that he started off doing stand up, with a debut album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, not only winning the Album of the Year Grammy in 1961, but also outselling Elvis Presley!)
While he never made the big splash on the silver screen that he's made on TV, several generations of movie-goers have come to know Newhart as the people-averse Major Major in Catch-22 as well as Papa Elf (to Will Farrell) in Elf.
And throughout his career, which has included at least five TV shows and several decades of touring, Newhart has consistently refused to 'dirty up' his material. Vicki was considerate enough to get us tickets to see him years ago when he appeared locally, and his act was hilarious without being in the least bit offensive. That's a pretty good to pull off (just ask Michael Richards)!
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