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George Robert Newhart (born September 5, 1929) is an American actor and comedian. He is known for his deadpan and slightly stammering delivery style. Newhart came to prominence in 1960 when his album of comedic monologues, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, became a bestseller and reached number one on the Billboard pop album chart; it remains the 20th-best selling comedy album in history. The follow-up album, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!, was also a success, and the two albums held the Billboard number one and number two spots simultaneously.

Newhart later went into acting, starring as Chicago psychologist Robert Hartley in The Bob Newhart Show during the 1970s, and then as Vermont innkeeper Dick Loudon on the 1980s series Newhart. He also had two short-lived sitcoms in the 1990s, Bob and George and Leo. Newhart had film roles such as Major Major in Catch-22 and Papa Elf in Elf. He provided the voice of Bernard in the Disney animated films The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under. In 2004, he played the library head Judson in The Librarian, a character that continued in 2014 on the TV series The Librarians. In 2013, Newhart made the first of his six guest appearances on The Big Bang Theory as Professor Proton, for which he received his first Primetime Emmy Award.

Newhart was born on September 5, 1929, at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, Illinois.[6] His parents were Julia Pauline (née Burns; 1900–1994), a housewife, and George David Newhart (1900–1985), a part-owner of a plumbing and heating-supply business. His parents were both of Irish descent, with his father also having some German ancestry. One of his grandmothers was from St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

Newhart was educated at Roman Catholic schools in the Chicago area, including St. Catherine of Siena Grammar School in Oak Park, and attended St. Ignatius College Prep (high school), graduating in 1947. He then enrolled at Loyola University Chicago from which he graduated in 1952 with a bachelor's degree in business management. Newhart was drafted into the United States Army and served in the United States during the Korean War as a personnel manager until being discharged in 1954. He briefly attended Loyola University Chicago School of Law, but did not complete a degree, in part, he says, because he was asked to behave unethically during an internship.

After the war, Newhart worked for United States Gypsum as an accountant. He later said that his motto, "That's close enough", and his habit of adjusting petty cash imbalances with his own money showed he did not have the temperament to be an accountant.

In 1958, Newhart became an advertising copywriter for Fred A. Niles, a major independent film and television producer in Chicago. There, he and a co-worker entertained each other with long telephone calls about absurd scenarios, which they later recorded and sent to radio stations as audition tapes. When the co-worker ended his participation by taking a job in New York, Newhart continued the recordings alone, developing this type of routine.

Dan Sorkin, a disc jockey at a radio station who later became the announcer-sidekick on Newhart's NBC series, introduced Newhart to the head of talent at Warner Bros. Records. The label signed him in 1959, only a year after it was formed, based solely on those recordings. Newhart expanded his material into a stand-up routine he began to perform at nightclubs.

Newhart is known for his deadpan delivery and a slight stammer that he incorporated early on into the persona around which he built a successful career. On his TV shows, although he got his share of funny lines, he worked often in the Jack Benny tradition of being the "straight man" while the sometimes rather bizarre cast members surrounding him got the laughs. But Newhart has said, "I was not influenced by Jack Benny", and cites George Gobel and Bob and Ray as his initial writing and performance inspirations.

Several of his routines involve hearing half of a conversation as he speaks to someone on the phone. In a bit called "King Kong", a rookie security guard at the Empire State Building seeks guidance as to how to deal with an ape that is "between 18 and 19 stories high, depending on whether there's a 13th floor or not." He assures his boss he has looked in the guards' manual "under 'ape' and 'ape's toes'." Other famous routines include "The Driving Instructor", "The Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Airline (and Storm Door Company)", "Introducing Tobacco to Civilization", "Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue", "Defusing a Bomb" (in which an uneasy police chief tries to walk a new and nervous patrolman through defusing a live shell discovered on a beach), "The Retirement Party", "Ledge Psychology", "The Krushchev Landing Rehearsal", and "A Friend With a Dog."

In a 2012 podcast interview with Marc Maron, comedian Shelley Berman accused Newhart of plagiarizing his improvisational telephone routine style (although not any actual material of Berman's). But in interviews both years before and after Berman's comments, Newhart has never taken credit for originating the telephone concept, which he has noted was done earlier by Berman and – predating Berman – Nichols and May, George Jessel (in his well-known sketch "Hello Mama"), and in the 1913 recording "Cohen on the Telephone". Starting in the 1940s, Arlene Harris also built a long radio and TV career around her one-sided telephone conversations, and the technique was later also used by Lily Tomlin, Ellen DeGeneres, and others.

courtesy-wikipedia
- Bob Newhart

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