The Chris Moeller Archives

Button-down precision

A couple years ago, I caught a Jerry Seinfeld interview in which he described a recent evening watching Tony Bennett in concert. He marveled at the pop singer's craftsmanship and the polish of the performance. (Paraphrasing) he said it was an act honed with time and exercise. He extended the tribute to Bennett by indicting the current prevailing mindset in show business of instant stardom. Performers today, he said, aren't willing to devote the time to measuring and perfecting the act. The American Idol-type shows, or even the Star Searches of a previous generation, peddle the illusion that talent is discovered, rather than developed. We easily forget that an A-list performer and star like Seinfeld toiled in comedy for more than a decade before becoming an "overnight success."

On Saturday night, blog contributor "Dave L" and I saw Bob Newhart in concert in Kansas City. Now in his 70s, Newhart is still dry, deliberate, gentle, and side-splitting in a performance that is as polished as any you'll see in show business. Newhart has always mined laughs from an audience's anticipation of the joke-- his infamous stammer is not an impediment of speech, but a device of the comedy. His act adapted perfectly to television (not once, but twice) because it's situation-driven (i.e. the classics, Lincoln's Press Agent and the Driving Instructor.) Bob was, inveritably, the last sane man, as all else around him slipped into chaos. It may sound strange, but his is the same "everyman" character quality played by another great comic performer, Cary Grant. They both had the ability to escape the situation unruffled. With Grant, the facade was that of elegance and a whiff of the aristocracy. Newhart has been just the average face in the crowd. It added to his legend of "dullness" that he once toiled in one of our most proven punchline professions-- accounting.

But don't believe it for a second-- you don't last for two decades at the top of network television, and for nearly half a century in the public spotlight, by being dull. There's an element of danger to Bob Newhart that boils just beneath the surface. He's dangerous because he looks like the rest of us. He knows that surprise is the key element of comedy. That's why he's been compelling all these years. He'll play the straight man for a Mr. Karlin, or a Larry and his brothers Daryl, but then rap you with a crying tantrum, like he did on the Tonight Show just days before Johnny Carson's final show. He's a jazzman of his craft. Not a Miles Davis, improvisational and explosive, but a Duke Ellington, painstaking and impeccable in his composition.

Newhart's first eponymous TV series was groundbreaking in its use of ensemble performance, and his second was nearly equally regarded by both audiences and critics (some of us even prefer it,) but Newhart's most enduring legacy, I believe, will be the comedy albums that proceeded both shows. "The Button Down Mind" and its successor, "The Button Down Mind Strikes Back," are probably the most influential, and certainly the best-selling comedy recordings of all time. Today, they seem to wholly embody that entire era of the early '60s, Kennedy, and Camelot-- the end of an age of mindlessness and mediocrity. As subversive as they were hysterical. The dark and twisted ruminations of the American accountant.

posted by CM @ 11:57 PM