Comedian Bob Newhart dies at age 94

Iconic comedic actor and comedy legend Bob Newhart died on Thursday morning, at the age of 94, according to his publicist Jerry Dingey.

Newhart died in a Los Angeles hospital after a series of short illnesses, which were not disclosed, marking the "end of an era in comedy," Dingey told CNN.

The comedian broke barriers throughout his life, and began a new form of comedy that was based on observation and psychology. His career spanned decades, beginning in the 1960s, and he never fully retired because he would later appear in guest roles on television shows.

Newhart is known for his two television series "The Bob Newhart show," and "Newhart." In the first, he played a psychologist in Chicago, and in the second, he kept audiences entertained as a clueless New England innkeeper. Together, the shows ran for 16 years from 1972 to 1990, on CBS, according to Variety. 

The actor later won his first Emmy for a guest role on the hit TV show "The Big Bang Theory" in 2013, where he played "Arthur Jeffries." However, he was nominated for an Emmy three times during his tenure on his two main TV series.

“There was a change that was going on, of which I was part of,” Newhart told the Comedy Couch blog in 2006, per Variety. “There was Mike and Elaine (Nichols & May), Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl, myself, Johnny Winters and Lenny Bruce. We weren’t doing ‘take my wife, please’ jokes. We weren’t doing ‘jokes’; we were doing little vignettes. So there was a change in comedy. I mean, we didn’t all get together and have a cabal and say let’s change comedy; it was just our way of finding what was funny in the world.”

Misty Severi is an evening news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.