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Bob Newhart (born September 5, 1929), is an United
States|American Stand-up comedy|stand-up comedian
and actor.

Born George Robert Newhart  in Oak Park, Illinois,
Newhart attended St. Ignatius College Prep and
graduated in 1952 from Loyola University Chicago
with a business degree.  He was drafted in the
United States Army|U.S. Army, and served in the
Korean War until 1954. 

== Early career ==
After the war he got a job as an accountant for
United States Gypsum.  In 1958 he became an
advertising copywriter for Fred A. Niles, a major
independent film and television producer in
Chicago.  It was at the company that he and a
coworker would entertain each other in long
recorded telephone calls which they would send to
a radio show as audition tapes.  It was the start
of schtick|shtick which was to serve him well for
decades.

== Stand-up comedy albums ==
His real start in comedy was as a stand up
comedian.  Warner Bros. Records, which had started
in business in 1958, signed him a year later. His
1960 comedy album, The Button Down Mind of Bob
Newhart, went straight to number one on the
charts, beating Elvis Presley and the cast album
of The Sound of Music. Button Down Mind received
the Grammy Awards of 1961|1961 Grammy Award for
Grammy Award for Album of the Year|Album of the
Year.  Newhart also won Grammy Award for Best New
Artist|Best New Artist, and his quickly-released
follow-on album, The Button-Down Mind Strikes
Back, won Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album| Best
Comedy Performance - Spoken Word that same year.

Subsequent comedy albums include Behind the
Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart (1961), The
Button-Down Mind on TV (1962), Bob Newhart Faces
Bob Newhart (1964), Windmills Are Weakening
(1965), This Is It (1967), Best of Bob Newhart
(1971), and Very Funny Bob Newhart (1973).  

Years later he released The Button-Down Concert
(1997) and Something Like This (2001).

== Television ==
Newhart's success in stand-up led to his own NBC
variety show in 1961 in television|1961, The Bob
Newhart Show.  The show lasted only a single
season, yet earned Newhart an Emmy Award
nomination and a Peabody Award.  The Peabody Board
cited him as:
:a person whose gentle satire and wry and
irreverent wit waft a breath of fresh and bracing
air through the stale and stuffy electronic
corridors. A merry marauder, who looks less like
Saint George#The legend of George and the
Dragon|St. George than a choirboy, Newhart has
wounded, if not slain, many of the dragons that
stalk our society. In a troubled and apprehensive
world, Newhart has proved once again that Reader's
Digest|laughter is the best medicine.

In the mid-1960s, Newhart appeared on The Dean
Martin Show 24 times, and The Ed Sullivan Show
eight times. He appared in a 1963 in
television|1963 episode of List of The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour episodes|The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

From 1972 to 1978, Newhart starred in the popular
The Bob Newhart Show|Bob Newhart Show on CBS in
which he played a Chicago psychologist and husband
of co-star, Suzanne Pleshette. 

Newhart guest hosted The Tonight Show Starring
Johnny Carson a total of 87 times; he hosted
Saturday Night Live twice, in 1980 in
television|1980 and again in 1995 in
television|1995. 

In 1982, Newhart returned to primetime with a new
sitcom, Newhart, on CBS, co-starring Mary Frann.
When the show went off the air in 1990, it ended
with a surreal scene where Newhart wakes up in the
morning on the set of his 1970s show and describes
that the entire Newhart series as a dream.

In 1992, Newhart made an attempt to come back to
television with a series called Bob. But it did
not develop a strong audience and went off the air
two years later. In 1997, Newhart returned again
with George and Leo on CBS with Judd Hirsch. 

He guest-starrred on ER (television)|ER in a very
rare dramatic role which earned him an Emmy Award
nomination, his first in nearly twenty years. In
2005 in television|2005 he began a recurring role
in Desperate Housewives as Morty, the
on-again/off-again boyfriend of Sophie (Lesley Ann
Warren), Susan Mayer's (Teri Hatcher) mother.

His other television work includes:

*The Entertainers (regular performer in 1964)
*Thursday's Game (1974)
*Marathon (1980)
*Ladies and Gentlemen... Bob Newhart (1980)
*Ladies and Gentlemen... Bob Newhart Part II
(1981)
*The Entertainers (1991)
*The Sports Pages (2001)
*The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (2004)

== Persona ==
Newhart is known for his deadpan delivery and his
slight stammer. Several of his funniest bits
involve hearing one half of a conversation as he
spoke to someone over the phone. In King Kong, a
rookie security guard at the Empire State Building
seeks guidance as to how to deal with the monster
who is "taking up 19 or 20 storeys, depending on
whether there is a 13th storey". He assures his
boss he has looked in the manual "under 'ape' and
'ape's toes'".

==Filmography==
Newhart's most memorable roles was in two very
different military-themed films, the 1962 in
film|1962 film Hell Is for Heroes and his
portrayal of Major Major Major Major in the 1970
in film|1970 film version of Catch-22.

He also appeared in:
*Hot Millions (1968)
*On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970)
*Cold Turkey (1971)
*The Rescuers (1977) (voice)
*Little Miss Marker (1980)
*First Family (1980)
*The Rescuers Down Under (1990) (voice)
*In & Out (1997)
*Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde (2003)
*Elf (2003)

==Honors==
In addition to his Peabody Award and several Emmy
nominations, Newhart's recognitions include the
following:
*In 1993 in television|1993 Newhart was inducted
into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
Hall of Fame.
*In 1998, Billboard magazine|Billboard magazine
recognized Newhart's first album as #20 on their
list of Billboard 200|most popular albums of the
past 40 years, and the only comedy album on the
list.
*On January 6, 1999 Newhart received a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame. 
*In 2002 he won the Mark Twain Prize for American
Humor.
*In 2004, Newhart was #14 in the list of Comedy
Central 100 Greatest Standups of All Time.
*On July 27, 2004, the United States|American
cable television network TV Land unveiled a statue
of Newhart on the Michigan Avenue
(Chicago)|Magnificent Mile in his native Chicago,
depicting Dr. Robert Hartley from The Bob Newhart
Show.

== Personal life ==
Newhart was introduced by Buddy Hackett to
Virginia Quinn, the woman who became his wife  on
January 12, 1963.  The two have four children
(Robert, Timothy, Jennifer, and Courtney), and
several grandchildren.

In March 2005, Hyperion (publisher)|Hyperion Books
announced that they would publish Newhart's
autobiography in 2006.

== Trivia ==
*The appearance of Suzanne Pleshette on the final
scene of the final episode of Newhart introduced a
technique that is sometimes known as "breaking the
fifth wall" — an analogy with fourth
wall|breaking the fourth wall in which the fifth
wall becomes the convention that two television
characters could not be the same person. The idea
for that scene came from Newhart's wife.
*During Newhart's television career he repeatedly
resisted playing a father. When presented with a
script of The Bob Newhart Show in which his
character's wife was revealed to be pregnant,
Newhart's response to the writers about the script
was "Suzanne and I love the script, but who are
you going to get to play Bob?"

==Further reading==
*Mayerly, Judine. The Most Inconspicuous Hit on
Television: A Case Study of Newhart. Washington,
DC: Journal of Popular Film and Television, 1989. 
*Sorenson, Jeff. Bob Newhart. New York: St.
Martin's, 1988.
*Reilly, Rick. Who's Your Caddy: Looping for the
Great, Near Great, and Reprobates of Golf.

==External links==
* http://www.bobnewhart.com/ Official website, a
frequently updated website maintained by Robert
Newhart (possibly Newhart's son)
*
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/n
ewhart_b.html Bob Newhart profile from American
Masters
*
http://comedycollege.publicradio.org/content/about
newhart.shtml About Bob Newhart, from the Comedy
College website
* imdb name|id=0627878|name=Bob Newhart
*
http://www.writenews.com/2005/031105_bobhope_hyper
ion.htm Hyperion To Publish Bob Newhart's Memoir,
from a media and publishing website