Opinion: Bob Newhart showed us the extraordinary in the ordinary

The life of Bob Newhart, who died this week at the age of 94, may remind us to see some of the glitter that can be cloaked in places that may seem like mere background.

He was working as an accountant in Chicago in the mid-1950’s, where, he used to insist, his motto was, “that’s close enough!” To relieve the tedium of cubicles and calculators, he and a friend began to concoct routines of telephone calls between historical figures.

When his friend left to take a job in New York, Newhart kept doing the phone bits, with just one side of the call.

Like say, Abraham Lincoln’s PR man telling the president, “The next time they bug you about Grant’s drinking, tell ‘em you’re gonna find out what brand he drinks and send a case of it to all your other generals … Trust me, Abe,” the PR man reassures a skeptical Lincoln. “It’s funny. Do it!”

Or the head of a 16th century British shipping company taking a call from Sir Walter Raleigh in the New World.

“Toe-bacco?” he asks “… Let me get this straight, now, Walt, you bought 80 tons of leaves? … You can chew it? Or put it in a pipe? Or … put it on a piece of paper, and roll it up … ”

The shipping exec has to stifle his laughter. And of course, we might now regret that there wasn’t more 16th century skepticism about rolling up tobacco leaves and smoking them.

Tapes of Newhart’s routines eventually made their way to a record company. The result was the 1960 comedy album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. The former accountant won the 1961 Album of the Year Grammy over his fellow nominees Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte and Frank Sinatra.

Newhart went on to have two hit sitcoms, in which he portrayed mild-seeming men, the first a Chicago psychologist, the second a Vermont innkeeper, trying to maneuver in a world of colorful characters. And of course there’s the role that introduced him to a new generation: Papa Elf in Elf.

In 2002, Newhart won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. On the stage of the Kennedy Center that night, he told a crowd in silk and sequins, “Standing here is a long way from the accounting department at the Glidden company.”