In Bob Newhart’s second hit sitcom, Newhart, he played a Vermont innkeeper with one simple goal: to read his newspaper without interruption.
It never happened.
One of the people who interrupted him the most was spoiled heiress-turned-incompetent maid Stephanie Vanderkellen. Played by Julia Duffy, this character was young, energetic, blonde and entitled. Newhart played… Newhart.
From Monday morning’s table read to Friday night’s taping, Newhart and Duffy danced comedically with each other. As a writer on the final season of Newhart, I observed their chemistry firsthand. The two could pull laughs from the smallest gesture: a slow blink or a raised eyebrow.
For their work on the show, Duffy earned seven Emmy nominations and Newhart earned three. (Unbelievably, Newhart’s sole Emmy win was as a guest actor on The Big Bang Theory.)
On July 18, when word broke that Newhart had died at the age of 94, Duffy posted a sad tribute.
A few days later, I reached out to her to offer her my condolences.
“I was thinking about it so much this week,” Duffy said on the phone. “And I thought, ‘Has there ever been anyone who was so self-effacing on the surface, who’s made such a huge impact?’”
She continued, “Of course, if I said that to Bob, he’d say, ‘Well, there was Jesus.’ That would probably be his response. ‘And then there’s me.’”
Read that exchange out loud and you’ll hear how perfectly Duffy understood Newhart’s unique comedic voice. Here’s the rest of our conversation, condensed and slightly edited.
As one of the stars of Newhart, your name is forever attached to his, which must be nice.
It is very nice. And it attaches me to so much, going back in the history of comedy and all the people who he worked with. And even Jack Benny, who was a very big influence on him.
It seems to me that Bob was more open to women being funny than a lot of the men of his generation. On his first sitcom, The Bob Newhart Show, Suzanne Pleshette and Marcia Wallace were both hilarious. And he clearly delighted in your work. Does that ring true to you?
It just seemed to me that on our set, funny was everything. Funny was king, and nothing else mattered. That was the goal. That was sacred.
As for Bob’s opinion of me… You know, he never directly praised me. I don’t think standups do that. It’s not their language. And I never expected or needed to hear how he felt about my work. But he treated me as an equal from the get-go and that was all the validation I needed. That sort of equality was not yet a given. We didn’t have Tina [Fey] and Amy [Poehler] then, and the other standard bearers. So being treated as an equal as a young woman in comedy was everything.
Plus, Bob was not one to gush. Early on, we were at something social and [Newhart’s wife of 60 years] Ginnie said “Does he tell you how great he thinks you are?”
I laughed and said, “Well, not exactly.”
Then she turned to him and said something like, “Newhart, you say all this to me… why don’t you say it to her?”
It was just hilarious that Ginnie was so direct because Bob was so reticent to express his emotions. I mean, he married the perfect person. She was wonderful. You couldn’t get away with anything with Ginnie. And I love the way she called him ”Newhart.”
Someone once said that Bob blinks funny. Do you agree?
His blinking was just as well timed as his pauses—his famous pauses. And the way he would pause on the way to a joke, as if to say to the audience, you can actually start getting the joke and laughing now. It’s remarkable what he did.
I think of him as a “context comedian.” That’s why he was so perfect for sitcoms. And even in his standup, he would build scenarios for characters to react to, like being the head of the West Indies Company talking to Sir Walter Raleigh on the phone and hearing about tobacco for the first time. (“So you roll it up and where do you stick it?… Between your lips, Walt? Then what do you do? [laughs and laughs] You set fire to it?”)
And usually it was the context of a person having to deal with a situation that they weren’t equipped to deal with at all. He’s all about reacting.
I just did a couple of episodes of Night Court and worked with Melissa Rauch, who is the loveliest person and, of course, worked with Bob on The Big Bang Theory. And she really understands how pure comedy isn’t dependent on the current time–the current way we speak and the current memes. Because that changes. But when you find the funny in something that’s timeless, that’s the purest and best comedy of all. Monty Python will be funny forever.
Newhart didn’t make current references. We desperately wanted it to still be funny decades later. And Melissa really gets that. She watched the show and wanted to follow in our footsteps. And it just seemed sort of cosmic to me that this pure kind of comedy is coming down from one generation to another, being respected and absorbed and carried on.
And I do say to young people, if you’re interested in comedy, you need to know who Ernie Kovacs is. You have to know where we came from. I worked with Tom Poston who did one of Bert Lahr’s routines from vaudeville. I’m connected to that, to vaudeville, and I feel so lucky.
I loved WC Fields and I remember once talking with Peter Scolari about the movie “Million Dollar Legs” and he said, “Well, the thing about Bill Fields is…” I’d never heard anyone call him “Bill Fields.” It’s like they were old friends. But in a sense they were.
We were all comedy nerds. Actually, Peter’s favorite comedian was Buster Keaton.
I remember once my husband Jerry and I were getting ready to have a TV night with the kids to show them Abbott and Costello for the first time. Jerry said, “What if they don’t think it’s funny?” And I said, “Well, then they’re out.” Fortunately, they laughed a lot and both turned out to have wicked senses of humor so we were right to indoctrinate them.
When did you last speak to Bob?
We talked after his birthday last year. His birthday is Sept. 12, the same as Peter [Scolari who died in 2021 and is known to millennials as Tad Horvath, Heather’s father on Girls]. And we’d been talking a lot because of losing Peter the previous year.
Bob always answered my messages then, at some point, everything started going through Jerry [Digney], Bob’s longtime pal and publicist. And I realized that it was too much for him. Ginnie had been gone a year and I just could not imagine Bob without her. It just seemed impossible. He absolutely needed her.
But I’ve been in touch with Courtney, their youngest kid. And I knew that Bob was at home and the family knew this was coming, and they were all there.
Is there an episode or moment that you consider your favorite for you and Bob?
My most memorable moment was early on. The character of Stephanie hadn’t been at the inn very long. She’d left home and her parents wanted her to come back. So in this episode, I had a phone call with my parents which was very funny and, obviously, you were just hearing my side. And as I’m rehearsing it, Bob was walking across the stage with his coffee, and he stopped and watched me.
So I said, “Don’t watch me. You can’t watch me doing a comedy phone call.”
And he said, “It’s harder than it looks, isn’t it?”
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