I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (25 page)

One problem we encountered was that we edited the show down to thirty-five minutes, but we couldn’t cut it down any more. We went to CBS and told them about our length dilemma, and they agreed to notify the affiliates that
Newhart
would run thirty-five minutes, instead of the usual thirty.

Unfortunately, some of the stations in the Northeast didn’t get the memo, so after thirty minutes, they cut to a commercial. The next day, people were reading in the papers about this wild ending on
Newhart
and they had no idea what the paper was talking about. Their feeling was the ending didn’t make any sense; the show just ended. The following week, CBS reran the episode.

The response was overwhelming. More than 30 million viewers tuned in to watch the finale. Over the years, the legend of that episode has only grown.

TV Guide
named it one of the five most memorable moments in TV history.
The Egg
gave us an even higher distinction, ranking us third in its 100 most memorable moments on TV. We beat out such classics as Rob Petrie stepping around the ottoman for the first time on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
in October 1964, and Geraldo hosting his eponymous show from a topless donut shop on November 2, 1989.

In my career, I’ve ended two series on my own, and I’ve been ended the other three times by a collaboration of the American public and the network.

In 1962, I became perhaps the only performer in television history whose show received an Emmy, a Peabody, and a pink slip all in the same year.

Truthfully, that show, the first
Bob Newhart Show,
was borderline. It was a variety show, hosted by me. I was fine in the monologues, which were basically stand-up routines, but turning out one a week was killer given that I had spent a lifetime developing my stage routines. Next would come a musical guest, followed by a series of sketches. I never felt comfortable in the sketches. Consequently, they weren’t very good.

(Somewhere just before the 1961–1962 show, Jerry Perenchio was my responsible agent at MCA. Jerry wound up one of the partners in Univision, which is on the block for between $12 and $14 billion. I should have paid more attention to Jerry’s investment advice.)

Midway through the first season, I wanted to call the whole thing off. I wasn’t getting along with the executive producer, Roland Kibbee. At Christmastime, I returned to Chicago and called my manager, Tweet Hogan. I told Tweet that I was unhappy doing the show and wanted to return to stand-up. I suggested that he call my agents at MCA and have them tell NBC “that Bob doesn’t want to do the show” so that the network could move another show into our time slot.

Two days later, Dave Baumgarten, who was a vice president at MCA, flew to Chicago to explain to me that things don’t work that way. Because I had a contract, I would be sued by the network. So I returned to the show in the new year. By February, Kibbee had been replaced as executive producer by Ralph Levy, whose background included
The Jack Benny Show
, and I had become head writer to exercise more control over the material.

After the first season ended in 1961, we were on the bubble for being canceled. There had been considerable tension between the show and the network the first year, so I wasn’t terribly anxious to continue. I met with Mort Werner, who was the head of entertainment for NBC, and he told me that the network wanted to make changes of its own, starting with firing the announcer, Dan Sorkin.

Though I didn’t know much about TV, I explained to Werner that Dan was largely responsible for me first becoming noticed by Warner Bros. Records back in Chicago, without which NBC would’ve never heard of me, so there was no way I would go along with that. He told me that he doubted they would continue with the show. Official notice followed a few months later.

I was both relieved and shaken. I was happy to be returning to stand-up, where I knew what I was doing, but I was also afraid that I was about to be outed as a flash in the pan.

After ending the next two successful series,
The Bob Newhart Show
and
Newhart
, largely on my own terms, I returned to television in
Bob.
It was a mixed-genre show, and I played a cranky (or was it edgy?) comic book artist. We said we were going to give the American public a Bob they had never seen before, and after thirty episodes, we found out that the American public didn’t want a Bob they had never seen before.

In 1999, I was asked to return to television again. I was sent a very funny pilot script about a bookstore owner living in Martha’s Vineyard whose daughter is marrying into a suspicious Vegas family. I was reluctant to do TV again, so I turned down the script. But Les Moonves, who was head of CBS at the time and is now head of the world, called Artie and asked me to reconsider.

I did, and for my own personal superstitious reasons, they christened the show
George and Leo,
owing, as I mentioned earlier, to my given first name being George. I enjoyed working with Judd Hirsch, who played a smalltime Vegas con man named Leo. There were some funny bits, but the show never rose to a consistent level.

My favorite was a scene in the pilot. When a hit man shows up at my house to bump off Leo, a nervous George is running out the door to try and right the situation. “Don’t whack anybody till I get back,” George says. The network didn’t wait long before whacking the show.

Sometimes you have to admit that it’s somebody else’s turn.

The real end, of course, is death. I’ve been there, too, and not just figuratively onstage. It happened on
ER
when I played a character named Ben Hollander for three episodes in 2003. It was my first intentionally dramatic role on television. I had done other things that were meant to be comedic but turned out tragic. I’ve never had the Hamlet fixation that comedians typically have, that there is a Hamlet inside you clawing to get out.

When the show’s executive producer, John Wells, called me and outlined the part, I was intrigued. The character I played, Ben Hollander, had lost nearly everything in life. His wife had died two years earlier, he was estranged from his daughter, and now he was suffering from macular degeneration, which was taking away his forward-looking eyesight and leaving him unable to paint. I knew I would never contemplate suicide, because I have a wife, kids, and grandchildren. But I understood the character well enough to empathize with him.

While being treated in the E.R., Ben befriends the doctor played by Sherry Stringfield. She agrees to have dinner with him at his house but misses the engagement. That night, he commits suicide.

“Oh, great,” Sherry said to me, “I get to be known as the actress who caused Bob Newhart to kill himself.”

Comedy can help us make it past something very painful, like death. Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event over which we have no control, deal with it, and then move on with our lives. It helps distinguish us from animals. No matter what hyenas sound like, they are not actually laughing. It also helps define our sanity. The schizophrenic has no sense of humor. His world is a constantly daunting, unfriendly place. The rational man is able to find humor in his.

I remember when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was opening at a theater in the round in Anaheim, California. Dinah Shore was the closing act. We went dark for two nights after the assassination. On the third day, I received a call from Sandy Lewis, the promoter. He asked if I would consider doing a show that night, and I told him that if Dinah would, I would.

I was very apprehensive. The theater was full. I went out and did my act without mentioning the Kennedy as sassination. The audience was fantastic. They were one of the most receptive audiences I have ever played to in my life because they were ready to laugh.

That week, one horrendous story after another unfolded. But the audiences kept filling the theater, and they kept laughing. People had to escape from the tragedy. For an hour and a half, they needed to blot out the real world. They were saying, “I’ll deal with life when the show’s over, but right now I need to laugh.”

That’s what comedians do. They help people get past pain. I’ve been asked to help do this by speaking at funerals.

It’s not easy speaking at a funeral. I’ve done it many times. On
The Simpsons,
I spoke at Krusty the Clown’s funeral.

In the show, I played myself, albeit drawn by the animators. The script was written by a former
Newhart
writer named David Mirkin.

Anyway, my character was just killing time waiting for a different funeral to start, and I was dragged onstage to eulogize Krusty, whom I didn’t know.

“I started my career several years before Krusty … so I never really learned anything directly from him. … I think in a way, in a meaningful way, all of us have learned from him. … That is from him being a clown on television for so many years … even though many of us … didn’t watch his show.”

What do you say about someone you don’t know? “Everybody seemed to like him. … He was a great man, a terrific father, and a credit to his community.”

When the actor Dick Crenna died, his wife, Penny, asked me to speak at the funeral. I knew Dick and his sense of humor, and she wanted some comic relief for his friends.

Dick lived in Royal Oaks, a very exclusive neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. Dick and I belonged to the same country club, which was over the hill in Bel-Air. Here’s what I came up with:

“In my life, I’ve driven to the Valley and back maybe 300 times, and nothing ever happened. But Dick Crenna never made one trip to the Valley and back when something didn’t happen to him. He would show up at the club and say, ‘Will someone please explain to me why …’ and then Dick was off on another one of his pet peeves.”

You see, it’s not easy speaking at a funeral.

Here are some of the towns I played last year: Carmel, Indiana; Hutchinson, Kansas; and Huntsville, Alabama. I even played Peoria. So why not limit my dates to easy-to-reach cities like Toronto, Chicago, and Reno? Easier still, why not just retire?

Performing stand-up comedy is a narcotic that I need— even if I only do it a few times a year. All the traveling and taking my shoes off in airports is inconvenient, but to me it’s worth it because I can make people laugh. This does do some good. I’ve noticed that people with a sense of humor tend to be less egocentric and more realistic in their view of the world. They also tend to be more humble in success and less defeated in times of travail.

Humor is also our way of dealing with the inexplicable. We had a major earthquake in Los Angeles in 1994, and it wasn’t more than three or four days later that I heard the first earthquake joke. Someone said, “The traffic is stopped, but the freeways are moving.”

The alternative to performing was playing golf every day. At one point in my life, I thought I could spend five days a week on the golf course. I even tried it. But it was painful going to the club every day watching everyone’s terrible golf shots, not to mention hitting my own terrible golf shots. All that golf also left me with a bad back.

Sure, I could rest on my laurels, but to me that’s
Sunset Boulevard.
That’s sitting in a darkened room, having Erich Von Stroheim come in and ask me which episode of which version of
Newhart
I’d like to watch that day.

I once asked Billy Crystal—on the golf course, come to think of it—if he was still doing stand-up. He told me that he was getting back into it, trying out some new material. I told him how pleased I was because I think that people who are able do stand-up have an obligation to perform. If you are able to take the stage and make people laugh, then you must oblige. A lot of stand-ups who land movie careers say, “Thank God I don’t have to do that anymore.” But I really believe that if you have the ability, there is an obligation to make people laugh.

Many years ago, I appeared on
The David Susskind Show.
That particular show featured an hour-long discussion with people like Buddy Hackett, Alan King, and Tom Poston. This was shortly after
The Button-Down Mind
broke, so I had been a working stand-up for about five minutes.

On the air, David asked me if I had a degree. I told him that I graduated from Loyola University with a degree in accounting. Technically, my degree was in “management,” but I told him it was in accounting because accounting is funnier than management—whatever that is.

With that, Buddy, in his own inimitable voice, countered with: “You mean, you don’t have to do this?”

Truthfully, I did. And I still do.