BREAKING: American Comedy legend Bob Newhart dead at 94

His television series The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart ran from the 1970s through the 1980s. He died following a short illness, per his publicist Jerry Digny. The Bob Newhart show was set in Chicago, where he played a psychologist opposite Suzanne Pleshette. On Newhart, he played a Vermont inn owner. The shows combined ran for 16 years.

Newhart won an Emmy in 2013 for his guest acting role on The Big Bang Theory. He was from Oak Park, Ill. and was an in the military before he entered comedy.

Newhart's comedy style, starting back in 1960, ushered in a new era of comedy performance. While previous styles were drawn from vaudeville, or the Borscht Belt, his style was based on observation and psychology. He was soon joined on the comedy scene by Steve Martin, who had taken up a similar, albeit wackier and more physical, approach.

The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart "was the first comedy album ever to hit the top of the Billboard charts, saving the then-struggling Warner Bros. Records in the process, and his first two albums held the Billboard Nos. 1 and 2 spots simultaneously, a feat unequaled until Guns N’ Roses did it with a pair of discs in 1991," Variety notes.

He was hugely influential to observational comedian Jerry Seinfeld. "Newhart hosted episodes of 'Saturday Night Live' in 1980 and 1995; voiced himself on a 1996 episode of 'The Simpsons'; appeared on 17 episodes of 'The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson' between 1966 and 1992 (guest hosting three times) and five on the Leno version between 1998 and 2009; appeared as himself in a 2002 episode of 'Everybody Loves Raymond'; and was part of an elaborate gag at the 2006 Emmy Awards, hosted by Conan O’Brien, before co-presenting the award for comedy series," Variety reports.