Bob Newhart has died at the age of 94—the comic who was our last connection with mid-century America. He became famous with the live comedy album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart (1960), which was a big hit, selling more than 1,000,000 copies and winning him two Grammys: Best New Artist and Album of The Year.

　　He was 30 and had already arrived at a style that would serve him well his entire career, eventually turning him into a beloved American figure—not merely an entertainer, but an embodiment of an important part of American character. His early balding and somewhat melancholy eyes marked him for comedy—that is, for suffering. Bob suffered the absurdities of modern life and made the middle-class man into a dignified figure, not despite but because he was put upon. Playing his own straight man, he invented stories that would show us our own conceited ways. The album showcases Bob’s one-man conversation style of storytelling, a speech to an absent audience or one end of a telephone conversation. It’s a lot like radio commentary on distant, but interesting events, and emphasizes the effort to deal with unreasonableness. Some are historic (Lincoln, the Orville Brothers, baseball) and some are mundane (a driving instructor) but all assert the virtues of the middle class (especially modesty) by pointing to their absence.

　　What’s So Funny About Being Middle-Class?

　　The major part of Bob’s career was TV, and it established him as a celebrity. He had two very successful shows, The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978) and Newhart (1982-1990) which ran for a combined 14 seasons, totaling 326 episodes. He had short-lived shows before and after this impressive career. He also made many appearances in movies, including successes in his late years—Elf—and on TV—the Professor Proton recurring character on The Big Bang Theory, which won him his only Emmy after many nominations. He had great successes with comedy albums and TV specials, and even wrote a late memoir, I Shouldnt Even Be Doing This.

　　But it was his two big shows that made him a fixture in American entertainment in the TV era. Bob received the Mark Twain Award at the Kennedy Center in 2002. He compared it to a near-death experience, his whole life flashing before his eyes. That’s the sort of answer that made the studio call his album ‘button-down mind.’ The ordinary man likes ordinary life because it is what the name says—orderly—and because the alternative is chaos.

　　American freedom and its dangers is his theme. He saw what’s interesting about life the way one looks at a car crash, and he therefore saw the need for a middle-class nation to defend itself by defending its moderate character. Bob did all this in the 60s and later, which should have earned him a reputation for a reactionary curmudgeon—it’s a testimony to his talent and skill, as well as to American love of clever entertainment, that he instead become so beloved.

　　Consider in this light his monologues. The technique achieves two things, it amazes the audience with the shocking or embarrassing events that we, despite everything our mothers and fathers taught us by way of good habits, cannot help wanting to see or hear about—figments of a life slipping out of control. But it also achieves this by showcasing an ordinary, decent man, not clownish figures or worse. It offers a recognizable American for a protagonist. Satisfying and stupefying!

　　The Bob Newhart Show

　　The moral authority of the decent American is the running theme of Bob’s first big show, in which he plays Robert Hartley, psychologist. On the one hand, it’s as normal as you could want—he plays a Midwesterner, he works in Chicago. On the other hand, life is crazy and psychology isn’t going to fix it, all it can really do is foster forbearance and even that is difficult. Freedom is hard to deal with, because everyone else is also free.

　　The foibles of neighbors, friends, coworkers, and spouses therefore make up the burden Bob has to bear, and to some extent prove his noble suffering. The successful man has to somehow help his fellow Americans; social equality requires quite a bit of work in private life to deal with obvious inequalities. The show is perhaps unique for turning the solidity of middle class men into comedy—a comic portrait of the virtues that make community work, an understated reassurance to an audience that had to deal with the ‘70s.

　　American nostalgia comes in for gentle mockery in Newhart, which goes hand in hand with the presentation of small town New England as, well, quirky.

　　Much of this portrayal depends on the attempt to extend into the post-hippie culture the kind of pop culture formed in the older America—one in which adults rather than teenagers mattered in social affairs. Of course, in the past, people matured faster, and aged faster, but even so Bob Newhart had an advantage in that department; he seems to have been born middle-aged. Then, too, he wanted to avoid some of the mockery to which comedy had descended—he famously refused to have children on the show because family sitcoms seemed to him to be jokes at the expense of dad. That would seem to be perfect for a straight man, but he rejected it because he wanted his deadpan style of comedy to suggest authority not foolishness.

　　The comedy show as a whole suggests that there is something that endures in America, despite social transformations. Put otherwise, what’s funny about people is the variety of ways in which they fail to be solid. You want to think the best of people, in part because it helps you can go on with a sense of your own dignity; comedy suggests that’s much harder to do once the difficulties of life set in—in fact, you might go mad. In this sense, the show is all about a sound man confronting reality. That reality check is the special province of Bob’s wife Emily, played by Suzanne Pleshette, who’s as beautiful as she is sarcastic.

　　Newhart

　　Bob’s comedy was in a general sense liberal. For example, the first episodes of Newhart are all about the American past. The show is set in small town Vermont. Bob, playing DIY and travel writer Dick Loudon, moves there from New York to buy and restore a historic inn—“James Madison slept there”—the Stratford. But in the first episode, we learn that it had actually functioned as a house of tolerance in 1775. Then Bob finds a corpse buried in the basement, which turns out to be a woman killed by a mob as a witch, even farther back in the Puritan days—his wife Joanna gets very attached to the story and turns the matter into a woman’s cause.

　　Then Dick conceives an ambition to run for town council and become part of the storied New England township democracy of yore—straight out of Tocqueville, you’d think—and indeed, to eventually become a congressman, senator, and president. Anyone can become president in America, we’re told… But Bob learns the council is a small club for whoever wants to join. They meet once a year, unanimously vote expenditures on public utilities in about five minutes, and then adjourn to the lobby for coffee and cake. Democracy, indeed, has conquered life’s difficulties.

　　American nostalgia comes in for gentle mockery in Newhart, which goes hand in hand with the presentation of small town New England as, well, quirky. We’re now a people quite taken with the Romantic charms of rustic tourism, bed-and-breakfasts, and the spectacle of fall colors. But Americans are primarily urban and suburban, wedded to the commerce and technology that make for wealth and order. Everything else is at least a little strange and best understood as a vacation.

　　The fun of rural nostalgia is an obvious pair for the fun of the urban professional life, as leisure and work are a pair, and perhaps retirement and activity. For people who knew something of that America, the charm of walking down memory lane is added to the gentle wit and the physical comedy. But I think the great affection for and the lasting fame of Bob Newhart owes to the fact that he was something modern Americans especially need, an avuncular figure who is not in the grip of foolish passion.

　　Perhaps people are looking at some level for guidance, not just reassurance. It’s perhaps the best way to remember Bob—a rare mix of wit, the artistic mischief-making required for good storytelling, and a mild temper. Something for everyone to like, and therefore something to bring everyone together.