Judd Apatow’s “Bob and Don: A Love Story”

Bob Newhart and Don Rickles occupied separate spheres in the comedy world of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, or so it seemed to viewers and listeners at home. Newhart achieved success overnight—not literally, of course, but about as close as anyone ever got in actual show business—with his début comedy album, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” Released in 1960, the record comprised a series of monologues with Newhart most often playing the ostensible straight man to an unheard interlocutor on the other end of a phone call. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard album chart—a first for a comedy LP—and would go on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating out Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra. A former ad man, Newhart had been doing standup for barely a year. He would become a fixture on television in the nineteen-seventies and eighties as the star of the CBS sitcoms “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart.”