Category Archives: History

Bob Newhart

RIP. He was a very funny guy, with a deadpan delivery that couldn’t be beat. A great straight man as well. And not just visually. He was famous for his hilarious phone calls, in which you only heard his side. We had one of his albums when I was a kid in the 60s. It was called “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” Here’s an example:

It’s funny, but I recently saw a rerun of the 80s show, and I’ve had the theme song (which was by Henry Mancini!) getting stuck in my head periodically since. The last episode might have been one of the most brilliant endings of any television series, if you were a fan of the show in the seventies. It was part of one of the best Saturday-night prime-time comedy lineups in television history, with All in the Family, and Mary Tyler Moore. Oh, and Mash.