Bob Newhart—who died on July 18, 2024—will be remembered as one of the greatest comedians in American history as well as the mind behind two influential sitcoms. But the one-time accountant was also a familiar face on the late-night circuit who, in an alternate timeline, could have been the permanent face of The Tonight Show.
Newhart was not only a regular guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, but a frequent guest host, too. He first filled in for Carson for a week in August 1966. One year later, Newhart’s guest-hosting could have gone beyond being a substitute. There’s a world in which the gig could have become permanent.
“NBC was having one of their arguments with Johnny about salary,” Newhart recalled during an appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson in 2014. According to the comedian, the network was considering letting go of Carson altogether at the time, and looking for potential replacements.
“Johnny wanted a raise, and [NBC] said, ‘That’s it. No more. He’s not going to hold us up anymore,’” Newhart recalled on Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend in 2019. “So they were trying these other hosts. And I did the show for three weeks in New York.”
Newhart first did a three-week run as guest host in the summer of 1967, just a few months after Carson had temporarily quit the show over a contract dispute. The host had been unhappy with NBC’s decision to air reruns of his show during the AFTRA strike, feeling the network had violated his contract. Carson eventually settled that dispute and returned to the show in April, after two weeks of Jimmy Dean-hosted episodes.
By July, Carson was taking off for three weeks of performances at Las Vegas’ Sahara Hotel, leaving the show to Newhart. Newhart then subbed for another three weeks that November, when Carson returned to Vegas for more shows.
Regardless of the reason, Newhart revealed on The Late Late Show that the guest-hosting stint was an opportunity for NBC to try out new potential hosts of the show as Carson’s demands gave the network more and more headaches. “They were grooming a lot of people,” he told Ferguson. “I was kind of being groomed.”
Even so, there was no bad blood between Carson and Newhart. “Newhart and Johnny were friends,” says LateNighter’s Mark Malkoff, host of our Inside Late Night podcast and the long-running The Carson Podcast. “Newhart did it the right way, and checked in with Johnny.”
By that time, Newhart was already a major name in comedy, having topped the charts (and beaten Frank Sinatra at the Grammys) with his 1960 comedy album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, and its sequel The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!
The comedian had already completed a brief stint hosting an eponymous variety show from 1961 to 1962 that aired weekly, but he didn’t find the grind of a nightly program appealing. “I didn’t want the job if they had offered it to me,” he said on O’Brien’s podcast. “Because I knew what a killer job it is.”
“Johnny himself said it’s his mistress,” he continued, “and if he had devoted the time to his marriage that he devoted to the show, he’d still be married to his first wife.”
That lack of desire for full-time desk duty wound up helping Newhart. “I didn’t get that nervous,” he told O’Brien of the guest-hosting run, “because I didn’t care if I lost the job.”
Newhart also recalled the toll the experience took on him during his Late Late Show appearance. “At the end of the three weeks, I was a blithering idiot,” he told Ferguson. “It’s the toughest job in the world.”
Regardless of Newhart’s feelings about the opportunity, the job was never really anyone but Carson’s.
“There was never any question that Johnny wasn’t going to come back,” Malkoff says. “But Newhart was one of the rare guest hosts that could have hosted the show [permanently],” he explains, citing the comedian’s standup skill set and Midwest charm. “He definitely was also in the conversation before, when they were going to replace Jack Paar.”
NBC talent exec Mort Werner “really believed that a standup comedian couldn’t do this full-time,” Malkoff explains, “but Newhart kind of disproved that.”
Despite not wanting a permanent nightly gig, Newhart wasn’t turned off from the Tonight Show job completely. He continued to guest host the show periodically through 1980. He wound up sitting in for Carson a total of 87 times, making him the third most frequent fill-in host in the show’s history (tied with John Davidson).
But as much as Newhart was a fixture on The Tonight Show, he was a bigger fixture in Carson’s personal life.
“In the late ‘60s, when Johnny would take the show to Burbank, Newhart and Johnny were buddies,” Malkoff says. “They would shut down this one bar, Sneaky Pete’s, and it would just be Carson, McMahon, and Newhart.”
“More than once, Carson slept over at the Newhart’s home,” Malkoff adds, noting that Carson phoned Newhart and asked to stay with him the night his marriage to Joanna Carson began dissolving.
Newhart also continued to be a regular guest of Carson’s, last appearing on the show two weeks before Carson bid his final farewell on May 22, 1992.
Of course, between all those appearances on The Tonight Show, Newhart launched his acclaimed sitcom The Bob Newhart Show in 1972. It ran for six seasons. He followed that up with 1982’s Newhart, which resulted in one of television’s most iconic series finales.
Newhart died in Los Angeles on Thursday following “a series of short illnesses,” according to his longtime publicist, Jerry Digney. He was 94 years old.
