No Real Hurry to Tell the Joke

Abbott set up Costello, and Burns relied on Gracie to finish the joke, but Bob Newhart is the rare straight man who gets laughs all on his own.

More than a half-century ago, Mr. Newhart became famous through stand-up routines that were one-sided telephone conversations in which his comic partner was neither seen nor heard. And just this month, Mr. Newhart, 84, appeared in a star-studded Apollo Theater tribute to Don Rickles (being broadcast on Wednesday on Spike TV), using another form of inanimate technology as a comic foil.

In a taped monologue, he made himself out to be a doddering old man who couldn’t get his video camera to work. Every time he started talking, he fell out of the frame, his mundane narration complementing shots of the ceiling.

Mr. Newhart has always been a gentle minimalist, which may be why he does not get anywhere near the critical respect of fellow founding fathers of modern stand-up, like Bill Cosby or Lenny Bruce. In his many television shows, including the jewel of his career, “The Bob Newhart Show,” his characters are a parody of reticent stoicism, using pauses and the unsaid to let the audience come to him and fill in the joke.

The show, which ran from 1972 to 1978 and is being released on Tuesday by Shout Factory in an essential boxed set for television fans, is not celebrated as much as the other hits of the era that were more fiercely political (“All in the Family”) or more daring (“Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “M*A*S*H”). But the comic situations in the “The Bob Newhart Show” are as well wrought as any of them, and it was the first to really successfully build a sitcom out of a stand-up persona.

The opening shot of the series is Mr. Newhart on a telephone, and almost every episode features a one-sided conversation. The rhythm of the show matches the unhurried deadpan of his album. Mr. Newhart plays a mild-mannered Chicago psychologist, Dr. Robert Hartley, settled into a contented but dull marriage. At the end of the second episode, he puts his wife, played with great verve and necessary warmth by Suzanne Pleshette, to sleep by talking about himself.