Bob Newhart is 86 and a little voice inside of him reminds him every now and again that he probably should be retired.
“I’m working as often as I want to, which is nice. I do maybe 20 dates a year, which is fine because I just turned 86 and at some point in your life you have to say, ‘Wait a minute. Wait. Wait’,” he said in that halting cadence that sneaks the punchline in without warning.
“‘This is crazy. This is crazy. You’re supposed to have retired 20 years ago’. But I just would miss it. It’s something I’ve done 55 years and it’s just tough to walk away from.”
The California-based comedian seems to have found retirement’s middle ground: “I’m trying to cut back to west of the Mississippi because those coast-to-coast flights are killers,” he said, then added that performing “is like an addiction and I’m slowly weening off. I’m in rehab.”
His west-of-the-Mississippi rule doesn’t interfere with his plans to pull into Desert Diamond Casino Saturday, Nov. 21.
We had a chance to chat with the legendary comedian, who was a regular on TV from the 1970s through to 1990 — “The Bob Newhart Show,” which ran from 1972 to ’78; and “Newhart,” which had an eight-year run from 1982 to 1990. He has been doing comedy since the 1950s. His 1960 comedy album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” debuted at No. 1, edging out Elvis Presley and the “The Sound of Music” soundtrack as it made history as the first comedy album to reach No. 1 on Billboard. It also earned him a 1961 Grammy for Album of the Year and launched a career that has hardly slowed down.
His comedy today: Newhart said his act dips back into his “classics,” including those famous one-sided phone call sight gags that launched his career. He has an idea for a new one, drawn from a TV commercial showing two guys in line at the grocery store. One has prunes, prompting the other to ask, “Constipated?”
“I wouldn’t say that to my wife. We’ve been married 52 years and I would never presume to say to her, ‘Constipated?’,” Newhart said, “and these two guys are strangers. The only thing they have in common is the checkout counter. That’s crazy; you’ve gotta laugh at stuff like that.”
He then rattled off several ways he could turn that episode into a phone call sketch that would involve detailed questions needed to diagnose the severity of the caller’s constipation: “ ‘You have diarrhea first? Oh, yeah, yeah, me, too’.”
Getting the proverbial retirement “watch”: “They never gave me a watch. I mean I never gave me a watch. The wonderful thing about being a multiple personality is you can get people to give you watches and you’re still surprised by it.”
He’s never been to Tucson, but he has a Tucson memory: “I did this movie in Guaymas, Mexico, ‘Catch 22,’ and it was directed by Mike Nichols. And Art Garfunkel was in the movie. He had to do a date with Paul Simon so he went to Mike and he said, ‘I have to get back to New York. When can I leave?’ And Mike said, ‘Well what we shot today will go tomorrow, but it’s the weekend and they can’t develop it. They will develop it and then I will have to look at it.’ So he said it would probably be a week before he could let him go. So Art said, ‘OK, OK, thank you.’ ... So Garfunkel called for a cab that afternoon ... and the cab driver pulled up and Art Garfunkel said, ‘Tucson.’ They drove him to Tucson, 200 miles away. ... So whenever I hear of Tucson that’s what I think of.”
The hassles of traveling: “It takes five or six hours and you lose luggage and you go through all that. And they throw people off planes. Not while they are flying, but before they are taking off. They haven’t gotten to that yet, but I’m sure we’ll read about it soon enough that they’ve thrown someone off in flight. But once you get there and you’re on stage and you’re having a great time with the audience, it’s worth it all.”
And then your body talks to you: “At 86 ... your body says, ‘You know Bob, you can do whatever you want. I’m checking out now. I’m not going to let you get on that plane. I’m going to give you cramps in your legs. I don’t want to do this anymore; maybe you do, but don’t include me’.”
