Product Description

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Media Type: CD
Artist: NEWHART,BOB
Title: SOMETHING LIKE THIS-BOB NEWHAR
Street Release Date: 03/20/2001
Domestic
Genre: COMEDY

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue
2. The Cruise of the U.S.S. Codfish
3. Merchandising the Wright Brothers
4. Driving Instructor
5. The Grace L. Ferguson Airline (and Storm Door Co.)
6. Bus Drivers School
7. Retirement Party
8. Ledge Psychology
9. Rocket Scientist
10. The Uncle Freddie Show

Disc 2:

1. Introducing Tobacco to Civilization
2. The Siamese Cat
3. Defusing a Bomb
4. A Friend With a Dog
5. The Expectant Father
6. On Poodles and Planes
7. The Man Who Looked Like Hitler
8. King Kong
9. Returning a Gift
10. Buying a House
11. Ben Franklin in Analysis
12. Daddy of All Hangovers
13. On Trains and Planes
14. Modern Witch Doctor

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2667 in Music
• Brand: NEWHART,BOB
• Released on: 2001-03-20
• Number of discs: 2
• Dimensions: .26 pounds

Amazon.com
Part of what Bob Newhart mastered, earlier on stand-up albums like The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart and The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! and later on his long-running TV series The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart, was capturing a brand of Everyman neuroses and heightening it, bringing mundane, common scenarios into the realm of the absurd--and the absurdly funny. Newhart also perfected playing a character involved in a conversation with the other party in absentia, as in one of his most famous routines, "King Kong," in which he plays the part of an Empire State Building security guard who calls his boss the night King Kong makes his famous ascent. ("Yes, sir, I looked in the handbook index under 'unauthorized personnel' and 'people without passes' and 'apes,' and 'ape's toes,' but it's not in there....") Something Like This... is a generous sampling of Newhart's best stand-up bits, and while some of his topics--airplanes, hating to fly--have now been so overdone as to be comic faux pas, rather than making his material seem dated they often serve to demonstrate just how rare a talent he is simply because the routines still elicit involuntary snorts of laughter some 30 years later. --Mark Hunstman

Customer Reviews

Button-Down Brilliance
Comedy dates. Comedy records date very quickly.

The Charlie Chaplin movies which had your great-grandparents in guffaws barely rouse a smirk on you. The wacky comedies of the fifties and early 60's now seem naive, innocent, and terribly dull. By rights, 40-year old comedy albums, particularly those with nary a nasty word on them, should be about as entertaining as a rainy afternoon with Aunt Clara showing you her collection of porcelain cats.

Somehow, perhaps because of the very simplicity of his act, Bob Newhart's recordings escape that fate. They are as funny now as they were when they first came out. And that is VERY funny.

It's a simple idea in most of Newhart's monologues. Make your audience do at least half the work. Give only one side of a telephone conversion, strategically provide just enough infomation for the audience to work out what the other person is saying. Play the driving instructor, but let the audience do the driving. Put the ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, like the Empire State Building security guard asking his boss if there's anything in the manual to cover giant apes. Or put the extraordinary man in a commonplace situation, like Abe Lincoln talking to history's first spin doctor.

Bob Newhart won the very first Grammy for Best New Artist. He's the only comedian to ever win it. He has starred or co-starred in 5 TV series, with a 6th, co-starring rapper Sisqo (?!?), slated for September 2001. His 2nd series, The Bob Newhart Show, where he played a psychiatrist, and 3rd, Newhart, as a Vermont innkeeper, were the biggest successes. In both those series, he remained the stoic solid center, surrounded by people far odder than he. In effect, he played us, and his reactions more than his actions were the source of his humor.

As funny as his co-stars were, Newhart was funnier still. Often with saying a word, his silence drew laughs. That same timing, those same funny silences, remarkably are just as effective on record (or CD) as they are on video.

Buy this CD for yourself and enjoy it. Or buy it for your kids, so they know who that old guy with Sisqo is. Or buy it for your great-great-grandchildren.

Because, very likely, they too will find it funny.

Still Works
This is the first classic comedy I've listened to in several years, so a few things struck me immediately. First, some of the conventions of stand-up have changed. In the earlier days of stand-up, the comedy was based on sketch material (almost everything here is a monologue) and the characters were as funny as the lines they were given to say. Second, the audience members withheld their applause until the end of the sketch and then applauded every bit. The third thing I noticed was that this comedy still works.

It comes as a bit of a surprise to me that satire and dark humor were not invented by Saturday Night Live. Though his first album (Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart) came out in 1960, Newhart's material and delivery are still every bit as contemporary today as they were then. Ledge Psychology, for example, is a sketch about a cop casually trying to talk a jumper down...and failing.

It helps that Newhart's material is based on historical events and industry, neither of which has changed very dramatically in the last 40 years. Budget airlines still scare the heck out of us; there's still a high turnover in driving instructors; and the more imaginitive bits (like "King Kong") still play because the reference material is still in our culture.

Newhart is the perfect understated stand-up comedian and this album really demonstrates what Ray Romano and Steven Wright owe to the older guys. I laughed. A lot.

Don't listen to this while driving
I've had this double disc set on my iPod for five days now, and I've found myself just listening to it over and over again. I'd heard much of this material before, but had forgotten just how funny it really was. It is sad that our culture has devolved to the point where most Americans would not find Bob Newhart's routines funny. To truly appreciate his humor from the '60's requires a good education, intelligence, and a disdain for the present state of "comedy" (i.e. comedy channel vulgarity, def comedy jam ignorance, etc...).

I question some of the material included on the disc, especially disc 2, which has less of the abstract "man on the phone" type comedy. I would have included routines such as "an infinite number of monkeys" and "automation and a private in Washington's army" instead of real world routines like "siamese cat" and "buying a house". Newhart's material really hits the mark when it is utterly abstract and ridiculous.

Classic "don't-miss" routines included here are:
1. Abe Lincoln versus Madison Avenue - "Abe, do the speech the way Charlie wrote it, would you?"...classic.
2. The Cruise of the U.S.S. Codfish - "Looking back on the mutiny"
3. Retirement Party - "Of course, Mrs. Wilson is down in Mexico with her hundred thou...and i'm still up here..with this crummy watch"
4. Introducing Tobacco to Civilization - "Don't tell me Walt, don't tell me..." "You see Walt, we've been a little worried about you lately..."
5. Defusing a bomb - "I'm gonna give it to you straight, Willard, you've got yourself a live one there..."
6. King Kong - "Well, sir, when people come to work in the morning, they're gonna see the ape in the street, notice the broken windows, and I think they're gonna put two and two together..."

I've never laughed so hard in my life. Buy this. It's worth every penny.