Comedy legend Bob Newhart has died aged 94 after a series of short illnesses.
His longtime publicist, Jerry Digney, confirmed he had died on Thursday morning in his Los Angeles home.
Newhart was well known for his deadpan style, having ditched life as an accountant to become a stand-up comedian.
Since he rose to prominence in the ’60s, the star appeared on a variety of comedy shows including The Bob Newhart Show.
He is beloved for a heartwarming turn in the 2003 Christmas film Elf, as Papa Elf alongside Will Ferrell’s Buddy.
Shockingly, it wasn’t until 2013 that Newhart would win an Emmy Award — which he landed for his role in The Big Bang Theory as Professor Proton.
Along with this momentous Emmy, he has numerous accolades to his name including three Grammy Awards and a Golden Globe.
In 1960, Newhart burst onto the comedy scene with his stand-up album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, which landed him Album of the Year at the Grammys.
Just over a decade later he began the Bob Newhart Show, which ran for 142 episodes and concluded in 1978.
It is widely regarded as one of the best sitcoms of all time, leaving people baffled that in eight seasons they failed to secure an Emmy win.
Comedy was at Newhart’s core and he explained his approach to the art of laughter in a 1990 interview with Los Angeles magazine.
‘I tend to find humour in the macabre,’ he shared. ‘I would say 85% of me is what you see on the show.
‘And the other 15% is a very sick man with a very deranged mind.’
Conan O’Brian credited him with championing ‘premise’ comedy as opposed to punchlines and gags.
‘There was a change that was going on, of which I was part of,’ Newhart told Guy MacPherson on the Comedy Couch blog in 2006. ‘There was Mike and Elaine (Nichols & May), Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl, myself, Johnny Winters and Lenny Bruce.
‘We weren’t doing “take my wife, please” jokes. We weren’t doing “jokes”; we were doing little vignettes. So there was a change in comedy.
‘I mean, we didn’t all get together and have a cabal and say let’s change comedy; it was just our way of finding what was funny in the world.’
Newhart was married to Virginia ‘Ginny’ Quinn — who was the daughter of character actor Bill Quinn —until her death in April 2023 at age 82.
The pair had wed in January 1963 after being set up on a blind date by fellow comedian Buddy Hackett, whose kids she was babysitting.
‘Buddy came back one day and said in his own inimitable way, “I met this young guy and his name is Bobby Newhart, and he’s a comic and he’s Catholic and you’re Catholic and I think maybe you should marry each other”,’ she recalled in 2013.
They had four children together; Robert Jr., Timothy, Courtney and Jennifer, and 10 grandchildren.
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