It took him long enough, but Bob Newhart finally made his Tucson debut Saturday.
The iconic comedian/actor made it worth the wait in an hour-long early bird concert Saturday evening that included classic sketches, some politically incorrect jokes and a very funny multimedia rewind of his life that included classic clips of his twin TV sitcoms — “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart — and his guest appearances on “The Dean Martin Variety Show” in the mid-1960s.
When Newhart first started comedy in the early 1960s, there was no such thing as political correctness, so doing a joke about a woman driver in his famous “The Driving Lesson” skit barely raised a feminist eyebrow. But Newhart asked Saturday’s audience filling Desert Diamond Casino’s Diamond Entertainment Center if they wanted him to change the driving student.
“I can make her Chinese,” he said, then launched into the skit speaking mock Chinese. “Look I can do eight more minutes of this or I can make her a woman driver.”
One woman in the crowd yelled out “Make it a woman. This is comedy,’" as if reaffirming the 86-year-old comedian’s belief that there should be some wiggle room in comedy to step over those politically-correct boundaries.
He might have gone too far, though, with his joke about Vietnamese gangs robbing homes in Los Angeles.
“How can people in L.A. tell if they’ve been robbed by Vietnamese gangs?” he asked. “The dog’s gone” — at which point the audience groaned — “and the kids’ math homework is done.”
Ouch.
Newhart’s humor was still as sharp as ever, even if some of his material was dated. Not that he had any trouble selling a Tammy Faye Baker joke to the crowd, which leaned mostly north of 60 and older.
“They finally got all the makeup off of Tammy and they found Jimmy Hoffa,” he said, and the audience burst out in deep bellowed laughter. “He’d been there all this time.”
He ripped on country music, a genre that’s an acquired taste, he said. He apparently hasn't quite acquired it, but he sure loves the song titles, he said.
“ ‘If the Phone Don’t Ring, It’ll Be Me’,” he offered. “I still don’t know what the hell that means.”
“ ‘I Never Went to Bed With An Ugly Woman, But I Have Woken Up With A Few’,” he said. “My favorite is 'I'd Rather Pass a Kidney Stone Than Spend Another Night With You’.”
Other topics on his mind included flying. He will be the guy screaming “Oh my God! This is it! And this is before we’ve taken off. We’re still taxing to the runway.”
And Catholic rituals like confession. A college student goes into the confessional and tells the priest he’s sinned; he’s had sex. The priest presses to find out with whom he has committed the sin, tossing out a few names of likely suspects. Then as penance tells the student that since he won’t come clean with the girl’s name he can't participate in the service.
The guy comes out of confession and tells a friend that not only is he free from church service, “but I have three leads” on a hot date.
Then there were a couple so-called Seahawks jokes, barbs aimed at the rivalry between the Arizona Cardinals and Seattle Seahawks, that he picked up since he arrived in Tucson. One goes like this:
Two Seahawks fans are hunting and they get a deer. They are dragging the animal by its antlers through the woods to their car. A fellow hunter tells them they would make better time if they dragged it by its hind legs.
Thirty minutes later, the one hunter tells the other, "He was right; this is going faster."
The other responds, "Yeah, but we're getting further away from the truck."
"I had no hand in these," Newhart said of the jokes, as a few Seahawks fans feigned boos. "I'm just passing them along."
