I have a shoebox filled with old photographs, relics of the time before we all had cameras on our phones and terabits of images cluttering up our storage devices. And that’s what we call them now, too, “storage devices,” which sounds neat and organized and no fun at all.

I went to the shoebox this month when I heard the news that Bob Newhart, the brilliant comic mind who practically invented the stand-up comedy album before becoming a television legend, had died at 94. Bob and I worked together years ago, and I knew there was a photograph or two of us on the set.

Bob Newhart was the star of four broadcast network comedy series, and they were all terrific. Two of them, The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart, were long-running smash hits. The other two didn’t fare so well. I worked with Bob on one of those, unfortunately, but aside from the disappointing financial implications of writing and producing a show that’s canceled after one season, it was an honor and a joy to show up to work every day and watch a genius work up close.

It didn’t look much like work at all, though. Bob’s trademark style, a deliberate, stammer-filled deadpan, was so effortlessly confident that you had a hard time understanding why he was so funny, even while you, and the audience, were laughing yourselves silly. Bob’s on-screen persona was “decent guy, surrounded by lunatics, trying not to be embarrassed,” which is a complicated set of character intentions that he could convey with a slight pause, a barely furrowed brow, and a perfectly timed Um …

“I don’t think I need all of this,” Bob once told me after a rehearsal while pointing to a two-sentence speech in the script. “I think I only need to say this,” he added, pointing to one word, “good,” at the top of the line of dialogue. Bob was scrupulously respectful of the writers and rarely asked for an adjustment, partly because he was a gentleman and a professional, partly because his voice was so indelible that we could hear him say the lines in our heads, so tailoring the dialogue was a cinch. But when a performer who had been at the top of his game since 1960, when his first comedy album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, hit No. 1 in the Billboard charts, asks for a small change in a line, you give it to him.

So we ran the scene again, this time with Bob’s fix. He shook his head again. “Good” alone wasn’t working. “Let me try it one more time,” he said. 

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So we ran the scene again, only this time, Bob added a little back to the line. “Well, good,” he said, and for reasons having to do with the mystery of what makes us laugh, the technical requirements of humor, and especially the intuitive brilliance of Bob Newhart, “Well, good” was hilarious, while plain old “good” was merely funny and the longer speech that was in the script originally was barely amusing. 

This happened nearly 25 years ago when I was barely 30 years old. I didn’t know it then, but working with Bob Newhart was a master class in the music of comedy. Some people hear it, and some people don’t. But Bob could hear it, compose it, and fix it all at once in the five minutes between rehearsing one scene and moving on to the next.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.