SATURDAY COMEDY SHOWCASE #1: Bob Newhart in "STOP IT!"

Albie's Note:  He is now such an American  television "sit-com" fixture that it's almost hard to think of Bob Newhart [born 1929, now 84 years young] as a stand-up commedian, yet that was exactly what catapulted him to fame in the early 1960s.  In that early original form, Newhart's stand-up was different from nearly everyone else's as his laughs were generated almost entirely by an amazing sense of comic timing.  His first hit "Buttoned Down Mind" albums featured mainly his side of gag phone calls, a premise which would probably have fallen completely flat in anyone else's hands. If you ever see any of his TV shows, notice how often [virtually EVERY episode in his '70s "pschologist" show] the scripts place him on the telephone, and how often he generates voluminous audience laughter with this simple device.

Here, in a 2001 skit from  the show MAD-TV, Bob-- playing a psychiatrist again-- uses that same amazing comic timing as he explains a radical new therapy.  It's really quite simple.

 

"This is not Yiddish, Katherine, this is English!"

 

 

  

PEACE