Bob Newhart, Comedy, and Augustine's 'Confessions'

By Michael Foley Bob Newhart passed away last month at the age of ninety-four. The Dean of the Deadpan Delivery shot to fame with his 1960 album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, which was recorded during Newhart's first appearance before a live audience. Prior to that, Newhart had been a rather unsuccessful accountant, probably because, as he quipped, his motto was "That's close enough." "Button-down" is defined as conservatively conventional, and that description roughly fits Newhart both personally and professionally. In 1962, friend and comedian Buddy Hackett set up Newhart on a blind date with Virginia Quinn (the babysitter of Hackett's children) and confidently predicted that the two would get married. Virginia was Catholic and so was Newhart, who had attended St. Catherine of Siena Grammar School in Oak Park, Chicago, St. Ignatius College Preparatory School, and the Jesuit Loyola University Chicago (he later credited the Jesuits for his "somewhat twisted way… of looking at life.") The couple married a year afterwards and, bucking the Hollywood trend, remained faithful to each other until Ginnie's death sixty years later. The Newharts attended Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills, and Bob was a member of the Catholic Motion Picture Guild, which sought to exert a positive influence on cinema's moral content. Bob and Ginnie had four children and ten grandchildren. Newhart was also button-downed onstage. In his two successful sitcoms, The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978) and Newhart (1982-1990), he played a straight man reacting in a usually stoic, stammering way to the eccentric characters surrounding him. But his strait-laced low energy came with a curve ball: he could also erupt unexpectedly with furious frustration, as he does here. Newhart was most famous for an imaginary telephone call routine, in which the audience can only hear his half of the - often absurdly hilarious - conversation: A press agent talking to Abraham Lincoln about his forthcoming Gettysburg Address ("You changed 'four score and seven years ago' to 'eighty-seven'? Abe, that's supposed to be a grabber. . . .Abe, we test marketed that and they loved it."); the head of the West Indies Company in England who is dismayed at Sir Walter Raleigh's shipments from Virginia ("Did we get the what?. . . .Oh! the boat load of turkeys, yeh! They arrived fine, Walt. As a matter of fact, they're still here, they're wanderin' all over London. . . .Well, y'see, that's an American holiday, Walt!"); and a security guard on his first night at the Empire State Building calling his supervisor at home while King Kong scales the skyscraper ("It's not covered in the guards' manual. . . .I looked in the index, yes, sir"). Reflecting on his success at this type of humor, Newhart opined: "The secret, and I did not know this at the time I started doing the telephone routines, is that the audience is doing the heavy lifting. They're supplying what you don't hear. So when they applaud at the end, they're really applauding themselves for figuring what the other end of the conversation was." I suspect that the audience's applause is more a token of gratitude for Newhart's ingenuous indirection than of self-congratulation, as Newhart modestly asserts. But the Dean of Deadpan is spot on when he describes his comedy as one in which the audience must do heavy lifting and figure out for themselves "the other end of the conversation." Indeed, the same can be said to various degrees of all comedy, which is why the genre is so compatible with the two ways of life most conducive to human happiness: classical philosophy and the Christian Faith. The ancient distinction between comedy and tragedy primarily concerns the presence or absence of a happy ending, not laughter per se. Dante's masterpiece is called The Comedy not because it's filled with knee-slappers but because it culminates in the Beatific Vision. Shakespeare's comedies contain dark elements, but end with the promise of a...