Fresh Air - Remembering Comic Bob Newhart

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

We remember comic and actor Bob Newhart, who died last week at the age of 94. In his stand-up comedy and hit TV series, some of the laughs came from his an awkward, stammering way of speaking. "It isn't an affectation. It's the way I speak," he told Terry Gross in 1998. Also, Justin Chang reviews Deadpool & Wolverine.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Today, we're remembering Bob Newhart, the comedian and TV sitcom star who died last Thursday at age 94. We'll listen back to a conversation between him and Terry Gross from 1998, and we'll begin with this appreciation. Bob Newhart was one of the most successful and durable stars in the history of television. He first appeared on TV in the 1950s as a guest on Hugh Hefner's syndicated series, Playboy's Penthouse.

In the 60s, he had a Peabody-winning variety series. In the 70s, he starred for several successful seasons on The Bob Newhart Show, playing psychologist Bob Hartley. In the 80s, he starred in another multi-year hit, playing a Vermont innkeeper. He had other sitcoms in the 80s, he starred in another multi-year hit, playing a Vermont innkeeper. He had other sitcoms in the 90s, then spent the 21st century playing recurring roles on everything from ER and Desperate Housewives to the sitcoms The Big Bang Theory and, as late as 2020, Young Sheldon. He also was a standout supporting player in such films as Elf and Catch-22.

Bob Newhart's career stretched over most of a century, yet he didn't enter show business until he was 30 when he stepped on stage as a stand-up comic for the first time. Bob Newhart was a former accountant in Chicago, working as an advertising copywriter. At parties, he would do little comic routines and tape some of them for the fun of it. Somehow, the tapes ended up at Warner Brothers Records, where an executive offered to pay to have Newhart's next nightclub appearance recorded for a comedy record album.

The only problem was, Newhart didn't have any previous nightclub appearances, much less any upcoming ones. But with the offer in hand, he booked a club, recorded his brand new act, and when it was released in 1960, the buttoned-down mind of Bob Newhart became the first comedy album to hit number one on the Billboard charts. One of its classic routines had him playing a driving instructor, meeting his new pupil, Mrs. Webb. And Bob Newhart's clever approach was that you only ever heard his half of the dialogue.

The rest was silent and imagined. Decades later, in an interview, he told me that despite that album's success, he hated listening to it. Because the producer of that record edited and shortened so many of Newhart's comic pauses to save time. But to millions of listeners, and I was one of them as a young kid, his recorded routines seemed perfect and well worth memorizing. How do you do? You're Mrs. Webb, is that right? Oh, I see you've had one lesson already. Who was the instructor on that, Mrs. Webb?

Mr. Adams. I'm sorry, here it is, Mr. Adams. Just let me read ahead and kind of familiarize myself with the case. How fast were you going when Mr. Adams jumped from a car? Seventy-five. And where was that in your driveway how far has Mr. Adams gotten in the lesson

backing out I see you were backing out at 75 and that's when he jumped did he cover starting the car I see you were backing out at 75, and that's when he jumped. Did he cover starting the car? And the other way of stopping. What's the other way of stopping? Throwing it in reverse.

Tom Smothers once described Bob Newhart as a one-man comedy team, which was a perfect description, except that Newhart played so well with others, too. On the Bob Newhart Show in the 70s, his Bob Hartley was delightful against Suzanne Plachette, who played his wife Emily. And when he was in sessions with his therapy patients, they were great foils against which to play.

Many obituaries describe Newhart's style of comedy as deadpan, but he once told me he hated that, too. He preferred the term low-key. But by any other name, what he did was hilarious. Here he is, listening to a patient, played by Jack Riley. I don't know, Dr. Harley. I think I'm making some progress. You are? I think I'm overcoming my agoraphobia. I didn't even know you had a fear of open places. Open places? Agoraphobia is a fear of open places.

I thought it was a fear of agricultural products. Sorry. Well, anyway, wheat doesn't scare me anymore. In Bob Newhart's next successful sitcom, Newhart, he got to exercise both sets of comedy muscles, often in the same scene. In the episode introducing Jack-of-all-trades Larry and his very strange and silent siblings, Newhart's Dick Loudon and his wife Joanna, played by Mary Fran, have a problem on their hands. Actually, in their basement. Workers repairing the ancient inn have uncovered the skeletal remains of a body several hundred years old.

Dick is looking for someone to remove the remains, and starts with a phone call. Hello, is this anything for a buck? Yeah, my name is Dick Loudon. I'm the owner of the Stratford Inn. Yeah, there's something we have to have moved. Not until next week. There's no way you could do it sooner. Well, it's a 300-year-old corpse that's buried in our basement.

Five minutes would be fine. Actually, we thought we'd pay you. Almost immediately, Larry and his brothers show up at the inn in person. Larry is played by William Sanderson. Oh, boy. Hi, I'm Larry. This is my brother, Daryl. That's my other brother, Daryl.

So, how are you doing? Okay, except I throwed my back out last week crawling under a house. Sounds like a tough job. Wasn't a job. I just like crawling under houses. This led to what I consider the ultimate finale in TV history. In the final episode of Newhart, in 1990, Dick gets hit on the head by a golf ball and awakens in bed.

But it's a different bedroom, the one from the Bob Newhart show. And he wakes up next to his wife from that show, played by Suzanne Plachette. The studio audience, like viewers at home, had no idea what was coming or who was under those covers. But what a terrific surprise when he starts describing his nightmare to Emily. All right, Bob. What is it? I was an innkeeper in this crazy little town in Vermont.

I'm happy for you. Good night. Nothing made sense in this place. I mean, the maid was an heiress. Her husband talked in alliteration. The handyman kept missing the point of things. And then there were these three woodsmen, but only one of them talked. That settles it. No more Japanese food before you go to bed.

Seventeen years later, Bob Newhart appeared on The Big Bang Theory as former children's TV science host Professor Proton. Sheldon, played by Jim Parsons, had hired the long-retired Arthur Jeffries, aka Professor Proton, as his birthday entertainment. He finally met the professor sitting on a suitcase on a landing, winded from climbing the stairs in the apartment building where Sheldon lived with his roommate Leonard. Leonard is played by Johnny Galecki. Sheldon speaks first. It's really you. Mr. Jeffers, I am so sorry. We should have told you about the broken elevator. I agree.

Professor Proton, it's an honor to meet you. Just call me Arthur. Leonard. Did you hear that? Professor Proton said I should call him Arthur. That means we're friends. No, a friend would have told me about the elevator. Look at me.

I can get as close to you as I want without my mom saying it's going to ruin my eyes. Is he dangerous? Actually, he's a genius. I am. That doesn't answer my question. Amazingly, Bob Newhart won his only acting Emmy for his guest appearances on The Big Bang Theory, and it became a delightful recurring role. But Newhart was one of TV's most beloved sitcom stars,

and his Bob Newhart show was part of the all-time best night of television on television. The time CBS filled its Saturday nights with All in the Family, MASH, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. Terry Gross spoke with Bob Newhart in 1998 and asked him about the unusual comedy approach that made him a star. Now, how did you come up with the one-sided phone call bit? Well, you know, I'm credited with that. And I actually, I don't, I certainly didn't invent the form. One of the first records ever was a thing called Cohen on the Telephone. One, and then of course, George Jessel used to do phone calls to his mother

and then Shelley Berman did a lot of one-sided conversations. Mike and Lane did two-sided conversations, but again they were telephone conversations. There are some routines that lend themselves to the telephone and I think what happens is the audience, the people listening to it, it makes it a hot medium in Marshall McLuhan's words

because they're involved. They're supplying something. They're not just sitting back and saying, oh, that's funny. Oh, that's funny. They're supplying the other end

of the conversation. I was, I belong to a country club out here and George Scott belongs to it applying the other end of the conversation. I belong to a country club out here, and George Scott belongs to it. And he asked me one time, he said, in that kind of gruff voice of his, he said, let me ask you something.

How do you do those telephone conversations? And I said, well, George, I just, you know, I ask a question, and then I wait long enough for the person on the other end to answer it, and then I start talking again. He said, that's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. And I thought to myself, no, George, Patton is amazing. This is just a telephone conversation.

I don't know how else to do it. That's the only way you can do it. Bob Newhart is my guest. Now, you're Catholic, and when you were coming of age as a comic, I think a lot of the comics were Jewish comics who were getting their start in the Catskill Mountains, which was a largely Jewish resort area. And I'm wondering if you ever felt that ethnic comics had a built-in constituency, i.e. people of their ethnic group.

And did you feel like you had that kind of, you know, because there was no borscht belt for you. No. Did you play the borscht belt at all? No, I never have. Right. The Catscht Belt for you. No. Did you play the Borscht Belt at all? No, I never have. Right. The Catskills, no. Right.

So did you feel like that... I played the Poconos. That's as close as I ever came to the Catskills. Right. Okay. Did you feel like you were missing out on something, not being identified as an ethnic comic? Well, you know, humor, I think, at that time was very regional, as I recall. I remember Phil Foster doing routines about the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And then television came along, and you had to make your humor continental. You couldn't make it regional anymore. It had to be... You had to find ways of not making it regional is what I'm trying to say. After some time, I realized that a lot of my friends, a lot of the comics are Jewish that I know, and they would refer to their Jewishness.

And then I began referring to my Catholicism and what it's like to grow up as a Catholic and began to realize how funny it is in many ways to grow up. It gives you a chance to kind of stand back and look at it and find the humor in it. What did you find funny about your Catholic upbringing? Well, for instance, I said the difference between Catholics and other religions

is basically we have confession and non-Catholics don't understand how you go in this little dark room and tell another human being terrible things you've done during the week. But if you're raised Catholic, there are certain tricks you learn about going to confession. Like you sit in the very last pew, and you watch the two lines move into the confessional and whichever line moves the fastest, that's the one you get in because that priest wants to get out of there.

And I remember the first time I did that and it got a big reaction from the audience and I realized, oh, I'm not the only one who did that. You kind of treat it as if it was a long line at the supermarket instead of the confessional. Can you remember for us what the venues... You know, that's interesting because it does suggest

they might have a confessional like, you know, 10 sins or less, you know? The swift moving line. I just thought of it. That's good. Can you recall for us what your early venues were like? What the smaller clubs, if there were such things at the time, and you know what Reno and Vegas were like

when you started doing them in the 60s? Oh, wow. There were clubs. They weren't comedy clubs per se, much as they'd be referred to today as with just one comic after another, getting up and doing five minutes. They were folk music clubs,

places like Mr. Kelly's in Chicago and The Hungry Eye in San Francisco and The Crescendo in Los Angeles. And you'd get up and do half hour, 35 minutes, and then this folk group would come on and sing. And then a guy would play the banjo and do protest songs, and then you'd be on again. And what about Vegas? Vegas was... Vegas was fun.

It was a chance to... You'd be there for a month, so it was a chance for the family to come up and be with you on the weekends and have some kind of normalcy to your life, as much as walking on stage twice a night and trying to make people laugh is normal. But that would be the...

And there was a camaraderie among Vegas people that still exists. I still see Steve Vanity and Shecky Green and Dick Martin and Don Rickles. And these are all friendships that were developed in Vegas. You mentioned Don Rickles. I know you and he are, or at least were, best friends. And it seems like such an incongruous pairing because, you know, I mean, the last thing in the world you would do is insult people on stage. were best friends. And it seems like such an incongruous pairing because, you know,

I mean, the last thing in the world you would do is insult people on stage. And Don Rickles is like Mr. Insult comic. Your temperaments couldn't seem more opposite. Well, I don't know. Are you really nasty off the stage? And is he really nice? Oh, he's very nice. Yeah, I'm probably nastier off the stage than I appear.

And he's nicer than he appears. But we feed each other. Our wives enjoy each other's company, and we enjoy each other's company, and we go away on vacation, and we're together for two or three weeks, and we have laughs. We just have a good time.

It's something I wish everybody could have a friend such as the Rickles. Gee, where do you guys go on vacation? Not to Vegas. Oh, no, no, no. That would be a working vacation. Oh, yeah. It would be what they call a busman's holiday. The last trip we made, we went to Southeast Asia.

We flew to Singapore and got aboard a liner and made stops in Bangkok and South Vietnam and North Vietnam and then Hong Kong, and then we flew to Beijing and China, and then flew home from Beijing. And it was a wonderful, wonderful trip. It was... We went up the Saigon River. You know, I'm wondering, I'm thinking, like,

how odd it would have been if, like, say I were a journalist in Vietnam, and there was Don Rickickles and bob newhart i thought i was hallucinating or something did you run into any people who well did a real double take seeing you and he will go by met a man um it's maybe i'm confused now whether it was china or v. But anyway, they kind of knew who I was. But they didn't know who Don was. And I think that upset him.

And I derived a great deal of satisfaction from it. But that has happened before. We traveled in Europe, and of course, they don't really know either of us. And they certainly don't know what to make of Don. Here's this loud American who's just yelling things at people and insulting them. Does he do that when he's touring? Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. Oh, sure. And so they don't quite know what to make of Don when we're on vacation.

I mean, does he do that ashtick, or is that just the way he treats people? He can't help it. He sees things, and he makes observations that are just, they're scary at times. They're so right, you know? Bob Newhart speaking to Terry Gross in 1998. The stand-up comic and sitcom star died last Thursday at age 94. After a break, we'll continue their conversation. And Justin Chang reviews the new movie mashup teaming two popular Marvel heroes, Deadpool and Wolverine.

I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. I have another question about when you started doing stand-up comedy. You started doing stand-up during the era I've come to think of as the

you dirty rat era, because every stand-up comic was compelled to do impersonations of James Cagney. And they also were required to do impersonations of Armstrong and Bogart. And you did some of those yourself. I was never much of a impersonator. Comics kind of have an ear for that sort of thing. But

I was never real good at it. I found what was interesting, and it certainly wasn't planned in any way, but the people I mentioned, Mike and Elaine and Shelley Byrne and myself, and Johnny Winters and Lenny Bruce,

it was a different kind of comedy than had preceded it. What had preceded it was material that could be stolen.

In other words, take my wife, please. Jokes. Jokes. I burn a hole in the coat. You know, you like this jacket. It's a beautiful jacket. I got eight pairs of pants with it. With my luck, I'll burn a hole in the coat. You know, well, anybody could deliver that line.

It wasn't personalized at all. But without realizing it, because I certainly wasn't aware of it. It's only in at all. But without realizing it, because I certainly wasn't aware of it, it's only in hindsight that I'm aware of it, you couldn't steal a Mike and Elaine routine or a Shelley Berman routine or a Bob Newhart routine or Johnny Winters routine. They would say, oh, that sounds like Johnny Winters. And so it became, it was just shift in American comedy that just happened. And I think why it happened was our audience was largely college kids

and they didn't have mother-in-laws. So mother-in-law jokes didn't mean anything to them. Thank goodness. And so to that extent, the humor that was being done in nightclubs was irrelevant to them. And it was also very expensive. Nightclubs had a cover charge and it was very expensive to go to a nightclub. And they didn't have the money obviously so they would buy uh they would buy a record and and get some pizza and some beer and they'd all sit around and listen to uh one of us and um and and that was their nightclub um and i think that's what happened right and and i mean

you you had an on-stage persona like you said, it wasn't just jokes. It was a whole character that was telling these stories. Exactly. Let me ask you about the first sitcom that you did, the first New Heart Show. And you played a psychiatrist. It's common now to have stand-up comics with our own sitcoms. In fact, it's almost obligatory. What was it like when you were a stand-up comic having a sitcom built around you? Well, it was paternalistic, really, because my manager, and my manager still is Arthur Price, and he and Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker

formed MTM Productions. And with the success of Mary's show, he came to me and he said, would you like to do a sitcom? And I said, yeah, I would, because it would keep me home, it'd keep me off the road, and I could spend some time with the family,

which was very important. So we then went about trying to come up with a sitcom. We started out with a, okay, what occupation is he? First of all, he's married, right? Okay, he's married and i i insisted on that we not have children that we not have precocious children because i hated that those kind of shows where they the the kids are always bailing the dumb father out of some scrape he's gotten himself into you know and we love you daddy daddy's a nitty but but we do love you. And, uh, resolved I wasn't going to do that kind of show. Um, and so then we started looking for occupations.

And, uh, I sat down with Lorenzo Music and Dave Davis, who I'd worked with before, who had been writers on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I knew Lorenzo from the Smothers Brothers Show. And, um, he said, well, you know, Bob is,

he's a listener. He's like a reactor. He reacts to people. What occupation would lend itself to somebody who listens? And they said, how about a psychiatrist? So they came to me and said, what about a psychiatrist? I said, well me and said, what about a psychiatrist?

I said, well, let's make him a psychologist because I think a psychologist tends to deal with less severely disturbed people. I didn't want to be making fun of severely disturbed people. I didn't want to be making fun of people with multiple personalities or schizophrenia or any of that stuff. Suicidal depression, yes. Right.

Just Mr. Carlin. Yeah, yes. Right. Just Mr. Carlin. Mr. Carlin actually was worse at the end of six years than he was when he originally came to me. He has a class action suit against me, I think, as do most of my group. Bob Newhart speaking to Terry Gross in 1998. More after a break. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to Terry's 1998 interview with Bob Newhart, who died last week at age 94. When we left off, Terry and Bob were talking about the Bob Newhart

show, in which he played psychologist Bob Hartley. Here's a scene in which Bob and his wife Emily, played by Suzanne Plachette, have just found out their respective IQ scores. You know, Bob, ever since you took that IQ test, you've been sitting around acting petulant. What do you mean by that? Petulant means suddenly irritated by the trivial. Emily, I know what petulant means.

You don't have to talk down to me just because I'm not as intelligent as you are. Bob, you are intelligent. Well, maybe I am, Emily, but ever since I found out what our cues are, well, I think it's affecting our marriage. What do you mean by that? Marriage is a wedding between two... Oh, Bob, I know what marriage means. What's it got to do with us?

We've got a perfect marriage. Emily, a perfect marriage is where the husband and the wife have the same IQ. Bob, it is not important. Next to perfect is where the husband is higher than the wife. Bob, forget it. Third is where the wife is one point higher than the husband. Bob, forget it. Third is where the wife is one point higher than the husband. Please, Bob. And the fourth, which is us, which is the worst,

is where the wife is 151 and the husband is 129, which is a difference of... 22. Now, part of your persona in the Newhart show was, you know, he was the straight-laced, middle-of-the-road guy who was kind of dull. Okay. How did the writers come up with that aspect of it?

Surrounded by a lot of nutty, eccentric people, but he was kind of dull. Well, he... Part of the success of Newhart was we tried to isolate what made the Bob Newhart show work. And what seemed to make part of the Bob Newhart show, at least the working environment of the Bob Newhart show, the psychologist's office, was you had to have a situation where no matter how outrageous the statement was made by one of the patients, you couldn't react to it.

You couldn't say, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard, Mr. Carlin. You know, you'd have to say, I remember one time I said, how did this week go? He said, it went very well. He said, oh, Saturday I was possessed by the devil. And I think my line was, okay, you want to go with that, Mr. Carlin? I couldn't say you were what?

So we tried to find those elements in Newhart, and we found them in the guests. No matter how unreasonable the guests were, you still had to kind of say, certainly, sir. I'll send the maid up

to the room right away. Do you have a favorite episode from the first Newhart show? I have several. There's one that kind of summed up comedy to me it was a

I had an African American insurance salesman came in he was very tall and muscular and he wore the Djibouti and he had a black Great Dane that he called Whitey and he wore the Djibouti, and he had a black Great Dane that he called Whitey. And he came to me, and he said,

I don't seem to be able to sell insurance policies. And I said, well, it has nothing to do with your personality. It's just that you kind of scare people, you know. And he said, well, thank you very much. So then we leave my office, and he said, well, thank you very much. So then we leave my office, and he said, is the men's room? And I pointed out just down the hall. And then he let the great Dane stay there. So with that, Jerry comes out, and he comes over to me, and we start talking.

And the black gentleman comes back in, and he says, sit, Whitey. And with that, Jerry sits right on the reception desk. And it got a huge laugh. And to me, it summed up what comedy does. It diffuses tensions in many areas. It gives you distance so that you can stand back and laugh at things. But there were a lot of Bob Newhart shows and Newhart shows that I love. I love one that Julia sang.

We did a telethon and it had nothing to do with me. I mean, I was the host of the telethon, but Julia... This is on the Vermont show. Yeah, Julia Duffy, Stephanie, everybody was doing something on the telethon to try to raise money and forget what the cause was. Julia did an up-tempo Old Man River,

and it's one of the funniest things to this date that I've ever seen. It was hysterical. I mean, her lack of understanding of the lyrics was incredible. That was a great show, too, the show in which you played an innkeeper in Vermont who also, at least for several years,

hosted a local TV show called Vermont Today, in which Michael, your producer, would either book you the most ludicrous or just incredibly boring guest. And I love the look on your face when you were interviewing somebody just outrageously dull, an outrageously pointless interview. We had Estelle Getty on one show before the Golden Girls, and she was a librarian who had come up with a new Dewey Decimal system. And Michael was trying to jazz it up. He had all kinds of things going in the background to kind of jazz it up.

You know, your shows have been rerun a lot on Nick at Night, and I think there was one, I don't know, 24 or 48-hour period when they did a whole Bob-a-thon. They were bringing on, I guess, a new series of yours, a new and rerun series of yours, and to introduce it and celebrate it, there was just hour after hour of continuous Newhart programs. What was that like for you?

Well, that's a tribute to the cast and to the writing. That the writing is still valid. And I had something to do with that. I told the writers, don't put in any Gerald Ford jokes because this is going to be rerun and rerun and rerun and we're going to look silly, you know. Because I knew then that it would go into syndication

and people would be watching it. And we tried to get away from being trendy for that reason. And it holds up. The material holds up, which is largely a tribute to the writing. The lapels and the sideburns don't hold up. That's the only thing I know. You wore a lot of plaid also. Oh, yeah.

Whose idea was all the plaid? My dresser was colored blind. Are you kidding? His name was Ralph, yeah. And he was such a nice guy, we didn't want to say anything, but... Oh, that's so Newhart. That's like quintessential Newhart. My wife would come in, and I'd be ready to go out,

and I'm not good with colors either, so she would say, Oh, my God, you're kidding. I said, What? She said, Oh, take the jacket off. It doesn't even come close to going with the shirt. That's funny. But, you know, of all careers to choose, when you're colorblind,

I mean, the wardrobe seems like the last one. Yeah, you think somebody might have said something about it at the studio? I remember reading an article in a paper about a one-eyed bullfighter. Again, we get back to material coming out of the papers. A one-eyed bullfighter in Spain who was reapplying for license to fight the bulls. And it occurred to me then that if there is one occupation where you really want to have two good eyes, I think bullfighting would be right up toward the top, you know? I mean, of all professions to choose. When you started on television, it was in the days when there were

three networks and in many cities, couple of syndicated kind of channels. But when a show was popular, everybody seemed to watch it. And television has just become such a different experience now because there's so many channels. Do you feel the difference? Well, of course, we used to get shares like 42, 43 shares. That's an enormous amount of people. Those are Super Bowl shares now. Exactly.

Because there was no competition. I just found out the engineer told me that I was the I Love Lucy of the United Arab Emirates, which I had never known. They showed the Bob Newhart show in the United Arab Emirates, which I had never known. He said, but they showed the Bob Newhart show in the United Arab Emirates, and people would go home early from work to see it. I never knew I was a hit in the Middle East. Huh.

The first Newhart show was on Saturday night, right after Mary Tarlin Moore. It was all in the family match, Mary Tarlin Moore, us, and Carol Burnett. Was Saturday night a good time? I remember when I didn't have something to do and I was feeling really bad about it. At least I could stay home and watch you and Mary Tarlin Moore, so it wasn't a

total loss. Well, it was a time shift. People stayed home Saturday because of that lineup, as they stay home Thursday because of NBC's must-see Thursdays. And it used to be, I think Monday was Lucy, I think, wasn't it? I don't remember. I think Monday, and then I think Burl was Tuesday.

And so it shifted. That was must-see Saturday. When I think of the Newhart character in your shows from the 70s and the 80s, I think of somebody who stammers a lot, not because he's unsure of what he feels, but because he can't really afford to reveal what he really feels, because it might be a little harsh or it might be a little too-something. So there's this constant kind of like stammering to just cover up and to try to kind of package in a better way what it is that he's really thinking or feeling.

Does that work for you? Well, that's interesting because the stammer is real. I didn't invent the stammer. I remember in the first year of Newhart, we were doing an episode, and it was running long. And one of the producers came up to me and said, can you run some of the words together? Because the show is really spreading.

And I said, look, this stammer got me a home in Beverly Hills, and I'm not about to change it, so you better get some words out of this script. No, it isn't an affectation. It's a way I speak, although I know what you're saying. It does help to get you over an uncomfortable moment. I mean, I think of him as a nice person who doesn't want to hurt anybody's feelings. Right.

But at the same time, has difficulty saying what he means. Well, it's really been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you, Terry. Thank you very much. Bob Newhart, speaking to Terry Gross in 1998. The comic and sitcom star died last week, leaving behind a string of comedy hits on TV and vinyl. He was 94 years old.

After a break, Justin Chang reviews the newest Marvel superhero movie, Deadpool and Wolverine. This is Fresh Air. In the new Marvel Comics-inspired movie Deadpool and Wolverine. This is Fresh Air. In the new Marvel Comics-inspired movie Deadpool and Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds revisits his role as the wisecracking anti-hero Deadpool, while Hugh Jackman returns as the fiercely brooding Wolverine from the X-Men films. Our critic, Justin Chang, says the new movie is as rude and crude as its target audience will want and expect, but that it also offers a few nuggets of nostalgia for old-school X-Men fans. Here's Justin's review. When Fox Studios released the first Deadpool movie back in 2016, it played like an irreverently

funny antidote to our collective comic book movie fatigue. Wade Wilson, or Deadpool, was a foul-mouthed mercenary who obliterated his enemies and the fourth wall with the same gonzo energy. Again and again, he turned to the camera and mocked the cliches of the superhero movie with such deadpan wit, you almost forgot you were watching a superhero movie. And Ryan Reynolds, Hollywood's snarkiest leading man, might have been engineered in a lab to play this vulgar vigilante. I liked the movie well enough, though one was plenty. By the time Deadpool 2 rolled around in 2018, all that self-aware humor had started to seem awfully self-satisfied. Now we have a third movie, Deadpool and Wolverine, which came about through some recent movie industry machinations. When Disney bought Fox a few years ago, Deadpool, along with other mutant characters from the X-Men

series, officially joined the franchise juggernaut known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That puts the new movie in an almost interesting bind. It tries to poke fun at its tortured corporate parentage. One of the first things Deadpool says is, Marvel's so stupid. But now the movie also has to fit into the narrative parameters of the MCU. It tries to have it both ways, brand extension disguised as a satire of brand extension. It's also an odd couple comedy, pairing Deadpool with the most famous of the X-Men,

Logan or Wolverine, the mutant with the unbreakable bones and the retractable metal claws, played, as ever, by a bulked-up Hugh Jackman. The combo makes sense, and not just because both characters are Canadian. In earlier movies, Deadpool often made Wolverine the off-screen butt of his jokes. Both Deadpool and Wolverine are essentially immortal, their bodies capable of self-regenerating after being wounded. Both are tormented by past failures and are trying to redeem themselves. On screen, the two have a good thorny chemistry, with Jackman's brooding silences contrasting nicely with Reynolds'

mile-a-minute delivery. In this scene, set in an abandoned diner where Wolverine is making a racket, Deadpool teases him about the fact that he's now wearing his famous yellow X-Men suit from the comics, something he hasn't done in previous movies. So, what made you finally wear an honest-to-God costume? Mine's red so they can't see me bleed, but I could see how yellow would be useful too. Have you been checked for ADHD? But I've had several STDs which were probably caused by ADHD. I could tell you more about the story, but only at the risk of incurring the wrath of studio publicists who have asked critics not to discuss the plot or the movie's many, many cameos.

Let's just say that the director, Sean Levy, and his army of screenwriters bring the two leads together through various rifts in the multiverse. Yes, the multiverse, that ever-elastic comic book conceit, with numerous Deadpools and Wolverines from various alternate realities popping up along the way. I suppose it's safe to mention that Matthew McFadden, lately of succession, plays some kind of sinister multiverse bureaucrat, while Emma Corrin, of The Crown, plays a nasty villain in Exile. It's all thin, derivative stuff, and the script's various wink-wink nod to other shows and movies,

from Back to the Future to Furiosa to The Great British Bake Off, don't make it feel much fresher. And Levy, who previously directed Reynolds in the sci-fi comedies Free Guy and The Atom Project, doesn't have much feel for the splattery violence that is a staple of the Deadpool movies. There's more tedium than excitement in the character's bone-crunching, crotch-stabbing killing sprees, complete with corn-syrupy geysers of blood. For all its carnage, its strenuous meta-humor, and an R-rated sensibility that tests the generally PG-13 confines of the MCU, Deadpool and Wolverine does strive for sincerity at times. Some of its cameos and plot turns

are clearly designed to pay tribute to Fox's X-Men films from the early 2000s. As a longtime X-Men fan myself, I'm not entirely immune to the charms of this approach. There's one casting choice in particular that made me smile almost in spite of myself. It's not enough to make the movie feel like less of a self-cannibalizing slog, though I suspect that many in the audience who live for this kind of glib fan service won't mind. Say what you will about Marvel, I certainly have, but it isn't nearly as stupid as Deadpool says it is. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Deadpool and Wolverine. On Monday's show, comic Nikki Glaser. She talks about sex so much on stage, she says she's come to think of her privates as her publics. We'll talk about

why sex is a recurring subject in her act, her self-consciousness about her body and how she looks, and what it's like writing insults for celebrity roasts. Her recent roast of Tom Brady made headlines. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Charlie Kyer. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger,

Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Joel Wolfram, and Heidi Samad. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B. Wood. This message comes from Grammarly. Back-and-forth communication at work is costly. That's why over 70,000 teams and 30 million people use Grammarly's AI to make their points clear the first time. Better writing, better results. Learn more at Grammarly.com slash enterprise. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation,

providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, Thank you.