September 5 would have been Bob Newhart’s 97th birthday. He is one of those who would be on my Mt. Rushmore of comedy, and I have been thinking about what made him so special.
I was the producer of his Grammy-nominated album “On the Record,” and the lesson of Newhart is restraint. The one-sided phone calls, that essentially let him do a duo act all by himself. The pauses that did more work than other comics’ punch lines. He built a career on what he left out.
I learned how seriously Bob took his silences when I produced the album. “On the Record” started out as a video Bob produced of his greatest routines, recorded new and live in Vegas. As a consultant to Nick at Nite (I have done a lot of weird things), it was my idea that we could release the video as an audio CD on the Nick at Nite label.
I listened to the video with my back to the screen. It worked beautifully except for thirty seconds of silence between two routines as Bob walked from one side of the stage to the other. I passed this note on to Bob through my Nick at Nite people, and it was reported back to me that the calm, relaxed, laid back Mr. Newhart had an attack at the initial suggestion that we edit the silence.
It seems that when Bob recorded the original Warner Bros. albums, someone at Warner edited his pauses, inside the routines. While I, and probably you, grew up listening and laughing to those tracks, and admiring his use of silence, he always felt that the editors had messed up his timing. So the suggestion that we cut a silence hit a nerve.
Once he understood that the silence was between routines and was genuinely dead air, he relaxed and agreed. I got my producer credit and the project got a Grammy nomination.
Bob was born September 5, 1929. He was an accountant who became the best-selling comedy recording artist of his moment, and a man who performed “clean” for seven decades in a business that does not require it.
We lost him in 2024. He’s gone, but his records are still here. That makes the case for comedy on record, in one sentence.
My favorite Bob Newhart routine is “King Kong,” about the night King Kong climbed the Empire State Building, told from the point of view of a new security guard. Sheer brilliance, and you can hear it here. What’s your favorite?