As I remember it, we were all gathered in my friend Brian’s house, which would place the evening in my first year of college. We were doing our part to support the local economy by consuming several bottles of a product that was created right down the road, flipping through channels as we did so. We came upon an episode of The Bob Newhart Show and decided it was good enough to have as background as we continuing swapping our own smart talk. By this time, deep into the nineteen-eighties, Newhart wasn’t exactly the sort of comic we were excited about. For our generation, his iconic sitcom had been reduced to a drinking game that called for imbibing on any of many occasions someone entered a scene with the line “Hi, Bob.” David Letterman had spent the better part of the decade establishing deconstructionism and irony as our preferred tones of humor. Newhart seemed a little square. Sure, that was basically the image he cultivated, but it still set him at a distance from the rabble-rousers who we insisted were more to our liking.

The episode we watched was “Over the River and Through the Woods,” a 1975 Thanksgiving-themed outing that is now uniformly considered a classic. Sure, we might have felt a certain relatability to the boozy shenanigans we saw on the small screen that night, but our appreciation was about more than that glowing square being mildly akin to a mirror. The jokes were precise and shrewd. They were grounded in character and performed with rascally charm by the entire cast. In every respect, it was comedy obviously crafted by absolute experts. Whatever cooler-than-thou defenses we had up were demolished by the show. We were buckled over laughing. I consider it one of the greatest sitcom episodes in the history of television.

Newhart’s entire career could be described with the same terms: precise, shrewd, grounded, charming, expert. Famously someone who came to standup comedy through unorthodox means — legend holds that his first performance in front of a live audience was staged expressly to facilitate the recording of his acclaimed debut album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart — Newhart was the form’s equivalent of a Swiss watch maker. Structuring his routines so he was delivering one side of a conversation with an unheard scene partner, like a team act that soldiers one when one person misses the curtain time, Newhart operated with exquisite timing, sometimes getting laughs from the lengths of his pauses.

His place as a titan of stand-up comedy who essentially invented a whole new approach is a settled matter. What remained somewhat undervalued throughout most of his career were his skills as an actor. He’s often celebrated for showing generosity in his two long-running sitcoms, The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart, by generally playing the straight man to more outlandish characters played by his castmates. He was no passive participant, though. The scenes worked because of the levels of care he brought to his reactions, the thin slivers or exasperation or concern he flashed in the face of the lunacy in front of him. Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, the breakout characters from Newhart, worked as well as they did because of Newhart’s poised hesitancy and shades of worry when they shuffled into a scene. Newhart made it look easy.

Goodbye, Bob.