About Last Week...

Bye, Bob

Newhart, that is.

And you don’t have to do a shot for reading that – it’s “Bye, Bob” not “Hi, Bob.”  Well, that was “Hi, Bob,” so now you do have to take a shot – come to think of it, two shots.

Bob Newhart started out working in a Chicago unemployment office when he realized that he was handing out checks for only ten dollars less per week than he was getting paid to hand them out, so he quit and went on unemployment, a decision that seems to perfectly capture Newhart’s aggressively normal subversiveness.

From essentially inventing the one-sided phone call – Abe Lincoln’s public relations guy is a classic – to creating  a pair of hit TV shows (and three that didn’t do so well,) Newhart’s style did not change too much.  It was the world around that changed and he used his being able to be a solid center around in which weird people like planets to great effect in both “Newhart” and “The Bob Newhart Show.”

He almost never worked “blue,” which is to his credit.  Not for prudity standards but it’s actually a lot harder to be a very very very comedian without indulging in some form of anatomy humor.

That being said, he was proud of the line “Tell my doctor?!?  I’m telling everyone I know” regarding the four hour erection “warning” on the Cialis commercials.

True fact: I had a friend who worked for the maker of Viagra – the original ED pill – and then when Cialis came out their market share plunged.  It was because of that specific warning.  The Viagra people saw it on their side-effects sheet as well but because it was such a rare, one-in-a-fajillion possibility, they did not need to put it in the commercials so left it out,

But the marketing folks at Cialis put it in specifically to attract the kind of attention and wonderment to which Newhart was referring.

It worked.

One of my favorite Newhart bits is his MadTV sketch with Mo Collins.  I have not been able to determine if he wrote it, but it sure sounds like him.  Watch and enjoy:

And of course he – he says his wife, really – is responsible for the greatest ending to a sitcom ever.  Note – not only did the audience know what was about to happen, neither did almost the entire crew and the other actors.

Watch and enjoy:

Bob will be missed.

Speaking about things being missed, there is a new abortion pill on the market and it’s called “julie.”