Button Down Concert

Bob Newhart made a career out of playing the only sane man in the room, anchored by his signature one-sided phone conversations and polite, stammering delivery. Button Down Concert serves as a live retrospective of his foundational material. Instead of testing new premises, he spends the hour reviving the routines that launched his career in the early 1960s, performing them with the practiced timing of a guy who has been doing this for over thirty years.

Filmed at the Raymond Theater in Pasadena for a Showtime broadcast and released to home media in 1997, the 62-minute set captures Newhart right around the time he was launching the short-lived sitcom George & Leo. The material is familiar but durable. He steps into the shoes of a mid-level employee trying to reason with an unreasonable world, whether he is an Empire State Building security guard calling his boss to report a giant ape, or a driving instructor questioning a student about why her previous teacher jumped out of a moving car. He also updates his famous tobacco routine, playing a public relations man struggling to grasp Sir Walter Raleigh’s pitch for rolling leaves in paper and setting them on fire. The crowd knows the punchlines before he hits them, and Newhart delivers exactly what they bought a ticket to hear.