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Hi Bob! Newhart covers life, career in new book

After nearly a half-century making us laugh, Newhart remains what set him apart from other comedians in the first place ... an ordinary man befuddled by the world around him.
/ Source: The Associated Press

Bob Newhart has some lessons for us about comedy.

Comedians are sadistic, he writes in his new book. Also self-absorbed, perverse, thin-skinned and prone to exhibit multiple personalities.

Newhart doesn't bother to excuse himself from these blanket pronouncements. But anyone who reads his charming memoir, "I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This (and Other Things That Strike Me as Funny)" (Hyperion), will come away only more sure of what they already knew: After nearly a half-century making us laugh, Newhart remains what set him apart from other comedians in the first place ... an ordinary man befuddled by the world around him. A guy like us. Just much shrewder and funnier.

Through the years, he has had a half-dozen TV series — two of them highly successful, and one, "The Bob Newhart Show," a classic that granted his comic sensibility the perfect outlet: a discomfited psychologist with a loopy clientele.

He has also been in numerous films, including the hit "Elf" as the diminutive dad of adopted full-size son Will Ferrell. In a guest role on "Desperate Housewives" last season he played the sad-sack ex-husband of Teri Hatcher's dishy mom.

And at age 77 he continues as a standup with the same refreshing insight that, in his 20s, made this Chicago-born ex-accountant the hottest comedian in the land.

"I've always likened what I do to the man who is convinced that he is the last sane man on Earth," Newhart writes, "... the Paul Revere of psychotics running through the town and yelling ‘This is crazy.' But no one pays attention to him."

Except Newhart has never, ever yelled. (His is the meek, though persistent, voice of reason further mitigated by his signature stammer.) Also: His audience hangs on his every word.

A 'Button-Down' comicHe was launched into stardom with the 1960 release of "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart," an instant best-seller that won him the Grammy for record of the year.

Among the routines on that album, Newhart imagined the flak the Wright Brothers must have met with when marketing their invention: "It's going to cut our time to the coast," their salesman warns, "if we have to land every 105 feet."

Newhart could also embody a security guard at the Empire State Building who, his first night on the job, has to phone his supervisor to ask what to do about a giant ape: "I doubt very much if he signed the book downstairs."

And he was able to penetrate the pinched brain of a railroad dispatcher who does nothing to stop a head-on collision because he doesn't have the proper form: "I can't touch these levers until I get a D-07."

Newhart zeroed in on stupid rules, by-the-book policies and bureaucratic muck, as well as the rest of humanity's SOP: all those things we do that don't make sense.

"Being a comedian," he writes, "means you are antiauthority at heart." And not only was Newhart rebellious with the targets he chose, but also in his "button-down" delivery, itself a rebellion against the typical style of standup at the time: a rapidfire, "take-my-wife-please" onslaught of jokes.

Funny, but Newhart doesn't fit the picture of a revolutionary. Not then. And not recently during an interview, this easygoing guy in gray slacks and blue blazer who looks like an affable retired accountant. (Which, of course, he sort of is.)

"I wasn't part of some comic cabal," Newhart cautions. "Mike (Nichols) and Elaine (May), Shelley (Berman), Lenny Bruce, Johnny Winters, Mort Sahl — we didn't all get together and say, ‘Let's change comedy and slow it down.' It was just our way of finding humor. The college kids would hear mother-in-law jokes and say, ‘What the hell is a mother-in-law?' What we did reflected our lives and related to theirs."

It still does. On the road today, not only do Newhart's vintage routines click with audiences, his trusty formula for comedy continues to bear fruit.

"I always said I wasn't gonna do a ‘doo-wop show,' recreating my ‘wonderful hits from the ’50s,'" he says. "On my show now I'll do one or two of the record pieces. But 90 percent of the act is new."

With that, he offers me a taste by noting how a recently announced regulation prohibits passengers from bringing a torch on a plane.

"Well, what about the poor Olympic guy?" chuckles Newhart, then becomes an airline drudge: "You're gonna have to put that out, y'know."

A number of Newhart's routines are included in his book's guided tour through his life.

He also drops some big names: Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Johnny Carson, Dean Martin, Buddy Hackett (who introduced him to Ginnie, his wife and the mother of his four kids, whom he married in 1963), and longtime best friend Don Rickles.

There's a bombshell for fans of "The Bob Newhart Show": In its opening-titles sequence, the distant glimpse of Dr. Bob Hartley (Newhart's character) crossing the Chicago River ... isn't Newhart! The day that footage was scheduled to be shot, one of Newhart's children took ill. Newhart and Ginnie were with her in the hospital. A Bob look-alike was hired for the scene.

"To this day," Newhart writes, "I have no idea who he is."

And there's another admission: Newhart was never really cut out for bookkeeping. He writes that, in balancing a petty-cash account, he used to cover the dollar or two discrepancy out of his own wallet, or, if there was a couple of bucks surplus, pocket it — all just to spare himself the ordeal of pinpointing his mistakes.

"Why," Newhart asked his boss when his scheme came to light, "would you pay me six dollars an hour to spend three or four hours finding a dollar-forty?"

But that doesn't mean he ever lost his fascination for numbers.

"If someone says, in 14 days they covered 5,200 miles, I have to get a piece of paper and figure how many miles per day that is," he tells me. "I get mad at myself, ‘cause I think, ‘What difference does it make?' But I have to know.

"There's a connection between humor and math," he goes on — "and music. The pianist Diana Krall, I met her at a party and we talked about timing. I said, ‘Timing in comedy is like how you know something's wrong when a 16th note should be a 32nd.'"

Bottom line: There's no margin for error in comedy, says Newhart, the last sane man on Earth. To behave otherwise would be crazy.