"One of the main inventors of the form": Bob Newhart's stand-up comedy mind, unbuttoned

“I’m a stand-up comedian, but I don’t inform people,” Bob Newhart told Marc Maron a decade ago, as the comedy statesman recorded his two-hour conversation with the legend for his podcast “WTF with Marc Maron.” As if realizing how that sounded, he corrected himself a beat later. “Well, I do, but I do it very quietly . . . ’Who am I?’ That’s kind of my attitude.”

Newhart was answering Maron’s question about how he weathered the 1960s stand-up scene when contemporaries like Richard Pryor pushed into confessional stories doubling as commentaries on social injustice. George Carlin acerbically railed against prudish, politicized norms.

Newhart steamed through the ‘60s with bits like “Benjamin Franklin in Analysis” and “Edison’s Most Famous Invention,” winning Grammys for his debut recordings “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” and “The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!”

These days we’d say Newhart worked “clean,” crafting his material devoid of vulgarity or intentional offensiveness, which not many comics do well and even fewer pull off with a sense of timelessness. Since nothing on Newhart’s “Button-Down Mind” albums qualifies as blue we might mistake them for being quaint and old-fashioned.

Maron thoughtfully offers another view.

“These records are profoundly important in terms of creating what the possibilities of stand-up could be,” he explains, “of comedy criticizing, satirically, the forces at work at that time: marketing, advertising, politics, bureaucratic, employment. You know, what was being presented as the future of America.”

Every generation knows its comedy by a select list of names. The current list is a lot longer than past ones, thanks to the proliferation of specials on Netflix and Max and the podcasting world. But all of them owe a giant debt to Newhart, who died July 18 at the age of 94.

Newhart is best known for his TV legacy, starting with his therapist Bob Hartley on “The Bob Newhart Show,” which ran from 1972 to 1978, followed by his tenure as Vermont innkeeper Dick Loudon on “Newhart,” which ran from 1982 to 1990.

Newhart’s “Bob Newhart Show” co-star Suzanne Pleshette surprised viewers at the close of the “Newhart” finale by showing up beside the star in bed, suggesting the previous eight years of bed-and-breakfast hijinks had been a dream. As New York Times critic Jason Zinoman wrote in his Newhart tribute, the "Newhart" finale's callback to “The Bob Newhart Show” was “essentially making a joke with a punchline that took 12 years.”

Creating one of the best TV finales of all time is something the most prolific creatives may never do.

Maron, however, reminds us that Newhart did more than that. He positions him as a stand-up innovator who stepped into his career in his 40s – late for any actor trying to hit it big, but also a transition time for our culture – pre-John F. Kennedy Camelot, but post-World War II. Newhart was part of a shift from rapid fire punchlines to methodical, contemplative comedy.

Maron enters his conversation with Newhart from the perspective of a fellow craftsman speaking with someone whose work is ageless. And it’s hard to understate how rare of that is. Instead of arguing about what modern comedy is supposed to be or do, Maron brings us its history through the perspective of someone who helped shape it.

Maron made his bones in the comedy world during an era when the superstars were Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams, and Jerry Seinfeld was a rising sitcom star. Since 2009, his probing interviews with entertainers about their artistic method and their lives have made his podcast one of the best. He has hosted all kinds of heavy hitters, including former president Barack Obama. A 2010 episode with Robin Williams was inducted into the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry.

Maron's sit-down with Newhart, though, feels different. It holds the weight of essentiality, freighted in no small part by his breathless introduction recorded outside Newhart’s Bel-Air home.

Some of this is standard Maron free-associating and garden-variety nervousness. Outweighing that, however, is Maron’s approach to the episode’s subject as a foundational link to the early days of comedy performance.

“I don't think Bob Newhart gets the proper respect that he should as a stand-up comic and as . . . one of the main inventors of the form of American stand-up shifting away from joke telling and from, you know, straight-up comedic entertaining to actually doing cultural commentary and satire,” Maron says in his introduction.

From there Maron points out that Newhart’s stand-up routines were among the first to blend storytelling and characters through acting out one side of a conversation, creating spaces for the audience to laugh at his joke by pausing, as he acts like he’s listening to what the invisible other party was saying.

Sometimes that person was Mrs. Webb, the unseen co-star of “Driving Instructor.” Others featured historic figures, like “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” and “Introducing Tobacco to Civilization.”

Newhart’s comedy assumed his audience was intellectually curious and imaginative, inviting them to play with him in the theater of the mind, which he described as a strange and funny place.

His tobacco scene imagines a phone conversation between Sir Walter Raleigh and a representative of the West Indies Company: “Harry? You want to pick up the extension? It’s nutty Wally again.”

He flexed his historical knowledge and his erudition without lording it over his audience, launching his famous Abraham Lincoln sketch by referring to Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders,” a 1957 classic exposing the inner workings of advertising.

Newhart mentions the book as a baseline for a joke that demonstrates how an ad man might have created Lincoln’s image.

Abe, you got the speech? Abe, you haven't changed the speech, have ya? . . . Abe, whaddya change the speeches for? . . . You what? You typed it. How many times have we told you: On the backs of envelopes. . . . What else did you change? You changed “four score and seven” to “87”? Abe, that's meant to be a grabber. We test marketed that, and they went out of their minds.

Newhart was a bridge between Pryor and Carlin and the previous generation of stars like Mort Sahl, who brought political commentary into stand-up; Mike Nichols and Elaine May’s improv acts; and Lenny Bruce. But in his work you may recognize the genesis of Seinfeld’s and Larry David’s style along with that of every other observational humorist.

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Listening to Maron’s conversation helps us to better understand that entertainment lineage, the way it connects the two of them and us to modern today, perhaps sparking a renewed sense of appreciation and a more critical mindset.

Many of the most popular performers drive our conversations about what comedy is supposed to be and do, ensuring endless arguments about the comic’s role and obligation to the audience. Provocation is the stock-in-trade of the biggest names, commanding huge paydays for performances that promise shock and assume offense.

Newhart won over audiences by opening their minds and making them feel brainy regardless of what they brought with them to his performances. But I’d imagine he’d break it down even more simply.

In a short phone conversation he had with Maron in 2018, which is now attached to the podcast episode, Newhart recalled something he told Billy Crystal that encapsulates his life’s outlook. “I think people who can make people laugh have an obligation to make people laugh,” Newhart told the “When Harry Met Sally” actor. “. . . It’s just a wonderful thing to be able to do, to make people laugh. Laughter is one of the great sounds of the world.”