I’m a rabbi and a comic. Bob Newhart was my biggest inspiration – The Forward

By Rabbi Bob Alper
July 19, 2024

I’m six months shy of 80 and in two weeks I’ll head from Vermont to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to do 75 minutes of stand-up comedy. Why am I nonetheless on the market? As Bob Newhart, who died this week at 94, defined, it was price it to him to take his footwear off at airport safety to have the ability to have the chance to make folks giggle.

Me too.

It’s superb to suppose that Bob Newhart has been my most essential function mannequin since 1960. That’s when his enduringly humorous comedy album The Button-Down Thoughts of Bob Newhart made its debut. A highschool junior, I memorized the routines, and once I attended Jewish youth conclaves, I nervously took the stage on expertise night time and carried out them word-for-word. Individuals laughed. I grew assured. And the women — the women — actually paid consideration. Comedy, I noticed, was good.

It by no means occurred to me that I may ever grow to be knowledgeable comic. I pursued a logical non secular and vocational aim, grew to become a rabbi, served giant congregations after which, on a whim, entered Philadelphia’s “Jewish Comedian of the 12 months Contest” in 1986, coming in third behind a chiropractor and a lawyer. It launched my stunning second profession that I am keen on.

In practically each interview folks ask about my comedy journey, and practically at all times inquire about my comic inspirations. I appear like Steve Martin, and Jackie Mason was a rabbi, however, I at all times clarify, it was Bob Newhart whom I admired greater than all of the others — and never simply trigger we’re each named Bob.

Newhart, who began out as an accountant, was by all experiences a mensch. He led an admirable private life: a 60-year marriage as a loving husband and devoted father and grandfather. No drama. No scandals. A quiet, unassuming man regardless of the tempting glamour that characterised his Hollywood world.

And his comedy was distinctive, significantly his monologues with a phone. Low-key but amazingly intelligent. By no means offended, by no means hurtful, by no means insulting (this regardless of his greatest buddy being Don Rickles). Newhart’s work, together with his namesake sitcoms, was simply guffaw-inducing humor that’s as good right this moment because it was within the Sixties. In reality, once I noticed him carry out years in the past, he did some new materials, but it surely was his sharing routines from his decades-old albums, which I knew by coronary heart, that had me laughing probably the most.

Maybe surprisingly, of all the various comedians I’ve watched all through the years, it was Bob Newhart, a practising Roman Catholic, who served as my private mannequin. Newhart’s stage presence was low-key, mild, and his slight stammer made him appear even considerably weak. I believe it was his grounding in his religion that impressed his always-respectful and sure, candy, model of comedy.

About 10 years in the past I carried out at The Chautauqua Establishment and realized that Newhart can be showing the next week. I shared my admiration with my contact there, and two weeks later a signed headshot appeared in my mailbox. It’s a valuable possession, exemplifying his kindness and comedic brilliance in simply four intelligent phrases. He wrote, “To Rabbi Bob Newhart.” How’s that for financial system?

“Might his reminiscence be a blessing,” we are saying. Every time I hear the phrases, “The Grace L. Ferguson Airline and Storm Door Firm” from one among Newhart’s routines, I chuckle.

And it’s at that second that Bob Newhart’s reminiscence is certainly a blessing.