Another Newhart commentary:
washingtonpost.com
Bob Newhart Comes to Call
By Jonathan Yardley
Monday, April 8, 2002; Page C02
This city isn't exactly Comedy Central, but it will be just that for one night six months from now, when Bob Newhart will be presented the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center. Yes, a case can be made that they've got it exactly backward — that it ought to be Mark Twain receiving the Bob Newhart Prize — but never mind. Justice isn't often served in these parts, so at this rare moment let the celebrations begin.
The selection of Newhart for the prize was announced rather quietly last week, which is appropriate since Newhart is — or at least the Newhart persona is — quietness personified. His first album, released four decades ago, was called "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart." In the early '60s button-down collars were among the most visible symbols of middle-class conformity, just as gray-flannel suits had been in the '50s. Newhart knew that by slipping into one he immediately identified himself with an audience that wasn't quite up to the bitter, angry humor of his contemporary Lenny Bruce but that knew, even if only dimly, that the button-down world wasn't quite as orderly and logical as its workaday attire suggested.
Newhart is very different from the three humorists — Milton Berle, Billy Wilder and Dudley Moore — to whom an ave atque vale was said in this space last week. He isn't broad (à la Berle) or acerbic (à la Wilder) or musical (à la Moore). His humor is indeed subversive, as theirs was, but a strong case can be made that humor by its very nature is subversive, i.e., it undermines conventional wisdom and skews our assumptions about right and wrong, left and right, up and down. With Newhart the difference lies in the od of subversion: While most humorists (especially those who perform as well as write) come at their targets head-on, Newhart approaches them aslant and even from behind, catching them unawares by sneak attack.
Around 1960 Newhart began to achieve a measure of prominence as a stand-up comic. He was the last — and to my taste the best — of a string of comedians who emerged from the much-lamented conformity of the '50s, all of whom contributed to the new mood of skepticism that swept the country in the '60s. Some of the most successful — Bruce, Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl — were intensely political, irreverent about American institutions to the point of hostility; Bruce in particular, as a later generation learned from the popular film based on his life, brewed a potent mix of laughter and rage.
Newhart's subversiveness took, and still takes, a different course. Of the six tracks on "The Button-Down Mind," three are subtle satires of the mendacity and cynicism of the American marketplace. "Abe Lincoln Vs. Madison Avenue," "Merchandising the Wright Brothers" and "Nobody Will Ever Play Baseball" are telephone conversations in which the only voice we hear is that of the sales agent or PR guy who is pushing (or, in the case of baseball, refusing to push) product. The greatest and most beloved of American presidents, the legendary fathers of manned flight and the National Pastime — all are reduced to product by the glib slimeballs whom Newhart manages to parody without merely ridiculing.
That's because they're just doing their jobs. Newhart is big on jobs. Having held a succession of pretty mundane ones himself — he was an accountant before he turned himself into a nightclub comic — he has a keen sense of how Americans are defined by their work. By contrast with most of what passes for American literature — which tells us that Americans have passions and neuroses and hang-ups but never seem to go to work — an evening with Newhart is a day at the office. The two Newhart skits that I love above all others are about men at work: a hung-over pilot flying to Hawaii in "The Grace L. Ferguson Airline (And Storm Door Company)" (where you go upstairs to the john to weigh your baggage), and a "Driving Instructor" desperately trying to hold onto the last shreds of his patience while his flustered student backs into a police car.
Newhart laughs at us and with us, in his stand-up routines and in the 142 episodes of "The Bob Newhart Show," which ran on CBS from 1972 to 1978. Playing a psychologist named Bob Hartley, who worked out of a Chicago office building, Newhart assembled a splendid group of actors who portrayed a rich cast of characters, not a single one of whom ever lapsed into caricature. Innumerable men of my generation fell in love with the sublimely sultry Suzanne Pleshette, who played his wife, Emily; as for Elliot Carlin, the head-case to end all head-cases, he was brilliantly played by Jack Riley, never more so than in the classic Episode 83, "Over the River and Through the Woods," where Emily leaves town and Bob gets into bachelor trouble with his male friends — watching a football game on TV, refilling their drinks every time their team scores, placing an order for 93 gallons of moo goo gai pan.
For my money those are the funniest 30 minutes ever shown on television. Maybe you'd prefer to put your own money elsewhere, but it remains that in this extraordinary episode as well as in almost everything else, Newhart touches the common experience with accuracy and intimacy. We laugh because the show is incredibly funny, but we also laugh because we've been there and done that. In his way — modest, low-key, ironic, sardonic — Newhart touches us all. For that he gets his own night at the Kennedy Center: for once, justice triumphant. |
