Bob Newhart (aka The Button-Down Mind): Five Years of Stand-Up Comedy – A Memories of the Greatest Moments

Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.

Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy.

The story is a lie. Newhart worked in advertising for longer than he did in accounting; and his showbiz ambitions were never just an afterthought. Newhart rocketed to the top because he was able to understand a Middle American type of man: the Everyman, who is overwhelmed by a world that sometimes seems weird.

He lived through the 21st century as an old man, doing his beloved shtick in films and on tv while reviving his old routines in concerts. Here are six of Newhart’s most unforgettable performances that can be streamed.

He didn’t show anger, curse or bust taboos. His style was gentle. His signature trait was a cheerful, sloth-paced delivery, pausing, slowly, and meticulously working his way through a sentence, as opposed to other motormouth counterparts like Lenny Bruce orMort Sahl. He belonged to neither of the great branches of American humor — the legacies of Jewish or Black comedy. A Roman Catholic from the west side of Chicago, Newhart came off as an entirely respectable example of Midwestern nice.