More than half a century ago, before the best-selling albums that topped the charts and beloved TV shows that bore his name and the accolades and honors that cemented his place in the pantheon, Bob Newhart was an accountant. This is a well-known part of his origin story -- the bean-counter who became the consummate storyteller who became, for a long time, the country's most beloved laugh-getter.
Newhart's 85 now, and decades removed from the terrifying leap that took him from a dreary but comfortable office job to the stage and screen. Yet he still talks of those long-ago days even now, perhaps to remind himself of the humdrum, anonymous life he escaped as the 1950s gave way to The Sixties.
"It happened earlier this week," he says from his Los Angeles home. "That's when I felt like I might have a career in this field called comedy. If the record album didn't work, then it was back to accounting."
He's referring to 1960's The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded at the Tidelands Club in Houston.
"No, not accounting -- I never would have done that," he says. " But that's the only thing I had going at that point. There was no thought of the longevity of it. I just hoped it was funny."
And it was, of course: The Button-Down Mind became the first comedy record to top the Billboard album charts. And it was the first comedy album to sell a million copies. It has often been said that its success saved Warner Bros. Records. And it's among the most important records ever recorded -- "the surprisingly subversive album that changed stand-up comedy forever," as The Onion's A.V. Club called it in May 2013, and rightly so.
Before proceeding further, here's what that sounded like:
"When it first came out, it was astonishing to see the reception it got," Newhart says. "I was totally unprepared for it. It never entered my mind it would sell anywhere near the million it sold. The next couple of years, 1960-'62, are a blur. All of the sudden I went from somebody whose phone never rang to having Ed Sullivan wanting you to appear six times on his show. You needed some kind of decompression tank to go through. It's lasted 55 years and young people still find it funny -- yeah, that's even more remarkable."
And it happened at a time one-liners were giving way to complete paragraphs, when comedians became storytellers. Newhart crafted whole routines out of the fine print of classified ad and sociology texts. And quickly, he discovered, there were others out there just like him aching to break free of the Catskills shackles. They wanted to talk about politics, religion, race, sex. And they wanted to sound like grown-ups.
"There was a sea change in comedy around the late '50s, early '60s with Mike Nichols and Elaine May and Shelley Berman and Lenny Bruce and myself," Newhart says. "We didn't do, 'Take my wife, please.' Our audience consisted of college kids. They weren't married yet. They didn't want to hear: 'My wife is so neat that when I got up to the go the bathroom she made the bed.' That had no relevance to their world. The world bothered us. We had to write about it, and we chose this new form of comedy, which wasn't joke-punch line."
But how did he arrive at his style?
"I found it when I was an accountant and had no visions of being a stand-up or a comedy writer," he says. "I watched comedians on Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen. I analyzed them. I enjoyed them, but at the same time I analyzed them: 'Why is that funny. Oh, I see. He would say something at the beginning of the bit and then come back to it at the end. Ah.' I was as much interested in the technique as the performance."
Then came the TV shows, in which he played himself but not really.
"On TV," he says, "that was 85 percent me. But the other 15 percent is a terribly sick, demented mind. My wife says, 'If people knew what you were really like, no one would show up,' and I say, 'That's our little secret. I tend to find the humor in the macabre."
He was so subversive he became beloved; that's what happens when you obscure a giant dollop of cynicism and a healthy amount of rage behind a deadpan demeanor and a kindly smile. Watch reruns of the old Bob Newhart Show, in which he played a psychoanalyst who wasn't very good at his job and didn't seem to like his patients. No one remembers that. Not anymore.
"People will come up to me and say, 'I don't mean to bother you, I just want to thank you for all the laughter you've given me,'" he says. "People do that more and more. Being on television, you're part of people's lives. People say, 'One of my fondest memories is my dad and I would watch the Newhart show, and he died five years ago, and I still think back to that.' It's great to be part of people's lives."
When he lands in Grand Prairie Friday night, the 85-year-old will likely reprise some of the bits that made him great; he's not above whipping out the occasional greatest hits -- "Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue," for instance, or perhaps "Driving Instructor," which he calls his "first commercial success."
The rest of the night, he says, will contain "observations on my life today. You'd better laugh at life, because that's the only way you're going to survive it. I was going to give an address at the Grammy museum, and I read something Nathanael West wrote. He said look, people should realize the world is against you. No matter what you do, the world is against you. The only intelligent thing to do is laugh. That's the only way you'll get through it. That about sums it up."
Bob Newhart performs July 10 at 8 p.m. the Verizon Theatre at Grand Prairie. Tickets are available here.
