The first death of note today is the death of comedian and television star Bob Newhart, 94. He had not just one hit series, he had TWO of them, with the second one notable for channeling the first one in the final scene of the final episode. It was a classic.
Newhart had some short illnesses at the end of his long life.
Born George Robert Newhart in Chicago to a German-Irish family, he was called Bob to avoid confusion with his father, who was also named George.
At St. Ignatius High School and Loyola University in Chicago, he amused fellow students with imitations of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Durante and other stars. After receiving a degree in commerce, Newhart served two years in the Army. Returning to Chicago after his military service, he entered law school at Loyola, but flunked out. He eventually landed a job as an accountant for the state unemployment department. Bored with the work, he spent his free hours acting at a stock company in suburban Oak Park, an experience that led to the phone bits.
“I wasn’t part of some comic cabal,” Newhart wrote in his memoir. “Mike (Nichols) and Elaine (May), Shelley (Berman), Lenny Bruce, Johnny Winters, Mort Sahl — we didn’t all get together and say, ‘Let’s change comedy and slow it down.’ It was just our way of finding humor. The college kids would hear mother-in-law jokes and say, ‘What the hell is a mother-in-law?’ What we did reflected our lives and related to theirs.”
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The other notable death for today is the passing of longtime pundit/financial affairs correspondent Lou Dobbs, 78. He started out respectable, working for CNN for many years covering finance and business, but then he went down the rathole of conspiracy theory. It was a shame. He went on the downhill slide when he joined Rupert Murdoch in 2009, after twenty years at CNN with his Moneyline program, to help launch Fox Business.
After the 2020 election, Dobbs used his Fox Business program to repeatedly promote false conspiracy theories that the vote had been rigged by shadowy companies that flipped millions of votes from Trump to Joe Biden.
These on-air comments helped spur voting technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic to sue Fox News for defamation. Fox News settled with Dominion last year for more than $787 million. But Smartmatic’s lawsuit — which also personally named Dobbs as a defendant — is still ongoing.
After the lawsuits were filed, Fox Business canceled Dobbs’ show, taking him off the air in an abrupt move announced on a Friday in February 2021.
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