Review: Hi Bob!

Hi Bob! by Bob Newhart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you’re watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – and if you aren’t you should be – then you know that Lenny Bruce appears as the comic lodestar of the early 1960s. He’s the one pushing the envelope, the one who’s both a model for and a provocation to Midge as she figures out her own comic voice.

If you look closely, Bob Newhart is there as well. It’s his routine that Midge’s wannabe comedian husband steals and performs as his own. (It’s the skit where he’s on the phone, as Abraham Lincoln’s press agent, counseling him about how to speak to the nation about Gettysburg.) It’s funny, even in the show we see it’s funny, but it’s also safe.

So, as we allow the history of American standup to solidify into a canonical narrative, that seems Newhart’s place in it. He’s the epitome of that formative moment’s notion of solid and safe. He is, to take a later era’s players, the Jay Leno of the early to mid-1960s, someone who reliably delivered laughs but didn’t leave behind the ripples of the more influential David Letterman or even Gary Shandling.

I think this book is Newhart’s answer to that implicit, whispered sense of his legacy. In it, he interviews – or, really, converses with – a series of today’s heavyweight comics. It’s loosely organized around topics, with the interviews broken up and spliced into something like a coherent whole, but the essence of it is to remind us that Newhart’s voice still resonates in the way he’s influenced this impressive wave of comedians. (And it is impressive: Will Ferrell, Conan O’Brian, Judd Apatow, Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel, and Lisa Kudrow.)

And, while if it ever comes to Team Lenny Bruce vs. Team Bob Newhart I’m all in for Bruce, I think that’s a good thing. If the Bruce school of comedy is all about making comedy a weapon to go after the hypocrites who are – and always will be – in control, Newhart’s is simply about taking the sting out of the discomforts of the modern world. He sees hypocrisy too, and he looks at it with his eyes open, but he takes it on by gentling it. He isn’t angry, and that anger isn’t born from the ashes of a frustrated idealism. Instead, he’s amused by the human condition. Bruce wants to get us out of our seats and agitating the status quo. Newhart wants us to see that the status quo is us. It isn’t revolution, but it is a small step toward making us all a little better.

This is an audiobook, which is a good way to hear Newhart’s voice. There’s perhaps a little more warble than there was in The Bob Newhart Show days, but his impeccable timing is still there. He is, at age 88, still a very funny man, and part of the charm of this book is to remind us that he has always appreciated comedy as an art form, that he was one of the boosters of the generation (and possibly generations) that have followed him.

There are some good insights into how comedy works. Silverman, Ferrell, and O’Brian in particular talk with him about some of the art of standup. There are also some nice nuggets about the comedy world of five or six decades ago. I mean, who else alive can talk about headlining in Vegas in the mobbed-up moment of the Rat Pack’s preeminence.

But the real reason to listen to this is that it’s a lot of very funny people telling stories and jokes that, with few exceptions, hold up. Lenny Bruce was incandescent and, if you buy into the narrative around him, that very incandescence meant he was doomed to a brilliant but short career. Newhart always cast a gentler light, one that’s directed the way for more comics than he gets credit for, and, remarkably, it’s still shining.


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