Comedian Bob Newhart died Thursday at the age of 94.

When I was in fifth grade, economic circumstances — poverty, to put it plainly — forced my mother and I to move in with my grandmother, who suffered from schizophrenia and other mental health issues.

It was not, as you can probably imagine, an ideal situation or a time I'm eager to relive.

One day, though, boredom led me to peruse my grandmother's dusty record albums and find, amid a collection that leaned heavily into Bing Crosby-style crooning, a strange outlier. It was a comedy album titled "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart."

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

Comedy on a record? That's odd, I thought. I pulled out the record and played it.

What I heard was mostly just a guy pretending to have absurd phone conversations with people we couldn't hear. It was kind, gentle comedy from, as I'd later learn, a deeply Catholic former accountant from suburban Illinois. It was nuanced and slow — nothing like Eddie Murphy's "Delirious" or other stand-up popular at the time.

But it was funny. It's still funny, more than 60 years after the album's........

© Times Union