Bob Newhart still standing up for comedy, laughing at life

No stool or a chair for Bob Newhart when he performs on stage. After nearly 60 years as a standup comedian, he still stands up.

"It's kind of a purist thing," says Newhart, who turned 87 in September. "That's the way it's done. I'll just keep doing it that way."

Newhart is about to make his first appearance in Hot Springs, after passing up a gig there not long after his career started to take off.

"I heard about it," he says of the Spa City. "I remember, years ago, when I first started out, 1960 or maybe 1961, I was offered a date in Hot Springs, and I said, 'What kind of place is it,' and they said, 'It's a casino.' I said, 'It can't be a casino, there's only casinos in Las Vegas.' Shows how much I knew."

The irony, perhaps, is that Newhart will perform Friday night -- at a casino, or at least sort of: the Oaklawn Finish Line Theater in Hot Springs.

He'll do somewhere between 75 and 90 minutes; there's no opening act. His set, he says, will include "one or two of the old routines -- 'Driving Instructor' or 'Sir Walter Raleigh' or 'Submarine Commander' -- because there's always a segment of the audience that wants to hear [material from] one of the records" that made Newhart a comedy superstar in the early 1960s. "And then the rest is just observations of hanging around for 56 years."

Newhart broke into the comedy business in the very late '50s, about the same time as Bill Cosby and George Carlin. His routines explored life's absurdities with a delivery somewhere just south of deadpan ("People identify with it") and a gentle slight stammer and an Everyman image, derived from his Midwestern origins and his early career as an accountant, that has stood him in good stead.

It also enabled him to basically play the straight man in the midst of chaos in two eponymous hit CBS TV shows, The Bob Newhart Show (1972-78) and Newhart (1982-1990). He's also had modest success in movies, including On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Cold Turkey, Catch-22, the Disney animated features The Rescuers (as the voice of a jittery mouse helping free a young girl from kidnappers) and The Rescuers Down Under, Legally Blonde 2 and Elf. And recently he showed up as a mystical warrior ex-librarian opposite Noah Wyle and Jane Curtin in the Librarian TV-movie trilogy (Quest for the Spear, Return to King Solomon's Mines and Curse of the Judas Chalice).

Newhart recognizes that people are going to recognize him when he's out and about, and he welcomes that.

"As you travel around, having been on television, you're part of people's lives," he says. "And you have a totally different relationship with them. Because they think of you as somebody they know very well.

"It happens all the time that a guy would say to me, 'Gee, that was my dad's favorite show, and I'd watch it with him and we would laugh. My dad's isn't here anymore,' and you could see in his eyes that this was a very happy time in his life -- and you were part of it. That's just a wonderful feeling, that you affect people like that."

In the midst of it all, however, he has always made time for standup gigs.

"We'd structured [the TV tapings] in such a way that we'd do three shows in a row, and I'd have two weeks off, and I usually went to Vegas and played some weeks [there]. Then we'd do three more shows. And during hiatus I'd play around the country.

"This was my first love. It was the first thing I did, and I loved doing it and I still love doing it. There's nothing like it."

And Newhart also recognizes the need for humor in an increasingly stressful world.

"I got a letter from a professor at my [alma mater], Loyola University of Chicago, who is writing about humor and how important it is, and he asked me to write a foreword," he explains. "And I said I'd be glad to, because it's something I've felt very strongly about, all these years that I've been making a living out of it, that humor is a very, very important part of our life.

"It's not just laughing at a joke, it's an attitude toward life. And as the world gets crazier, it's more important to laugh at it. It's a survival technique."

Weekend on 10/13/2016