The Button-Down Faith of Bob Newhart
We say goodbye to comedian Bob Newhart, who last week passed from this world at the age of 94. The office functionary turned master of extracting maximum laughter from minimal effort ranks among a small number whose comedy was beloved across generations. The college students who helped make his seminal Button-Down Mind record the Grammys’ album of the year—any kind of album—in 1960 became the adult fans of his Bob Newhart Show in the seventies. Their kids, including yours truly, split their sides watching him deadpan his way through the eccentrics of a small Vermont town in his eighties’ followup hit series Newhart. And millennials would recognize him instantly as the narrator of the perennial secular Christmas standard Elf.
Newhart will be remembered, certainly, for his signature comedic tools: the practiced stutter, the half-of-a-phone-conversation setup, the persona of a dull, basically sane man forced to cope with insanity all around him. A Midwesterner and an accountant by training, there was in him nothing of the outrageousness that today seems to be a necessary part of a comedian’s CV: no drugs, no profanity or blasphemy, no performative “breaking of boundaries” or tweaking of respectable institutions. He did the much harder work of being normal, even bland, and letting his interactions with an abnormal world induce uncontrollable laughter that started from inside us.
In this, he was reflecting his own life. One of my late father’s favorite stories was of running into Newhart in a Chicago airport and having a pleasant exchange about whether he should expect turbulence on his flight. My dad met one of his heroes and . . . he turned out to be humble and grounded.
Newhart’s faith and family life, too, closely hewed to the normalcy in his art. He was a lifelong Catholic. If he were like countless Catholic-identified celebrities over the decades and certainly today, that might mean that he wore a crucifix his mother gave him, or that he went to Mass at Christmas, or that he believed in some kind of divine power and saw Catholicism as one of many ways to tap into it. For a far smaller number, it might mean the kind of bold, public, activist faith-witness that so many rank-and-file Catholics seem to crave from famous ones.
Bob Newhart didn’t fit any of those categories. Though he was always happy to talk about his faith and though he did lend his time to low-key Catholic Hollywood endeavors, his faith just meant living as a normal Catholic: going to Mass and the sacraments, remembering his catechetical formation, and staying married to one woman his entire life (sixty years) and having children with her. Like any non-celebrity Catholic with a right, normal, dull sense of priorities, he adapted his career to the needs of his family, not the other way around. Because that’s what you do.
It’s possible that you could dig into Newhart’s public past and find that at some point over his ninety-four years he was enticed to say something not-entirely-sound about homosexuality, or abortion, or IVF, or some other shibboleth of foursquare orthodox Catholicism. He was a star entertainer for a long time, the entertainment world is full of tempting errors, and the entertainment media are relentless in trying to tease out such things from Christian celebrities.
But that would be to miss the point. Whatever he did or believed around the margins, the overwhelming character of his Catholicism, like his comedy, was normalcy. And its contrast with the abnormal world around him—and us—should also make us smile. May he rest in peace.
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