Something Like This... The Bob Newhart Anthology
Part of what Bob Newhart mastered, earlier on stand-up albums likeThe Button-Down Mind of Bob NewhartandThe Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!and later on his long-running TV seriesThe Bob Newhart ShowandNewhart, 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