Barry Kemp

Growing up, I'd watch Newhart and Coach with my dad.

His favorite episode of Coach was the one where Hayden and Dauber buy motorcycles, but have to keep them hidden from their significant others.

For Father's Day one year, I bought him the DVD from that season with that episode on it, and we've watched it multiple times over the years.

I remember being especially impressed when my dad pointed at Dauber and said "That's the voice of Patrick from SpongeBob.

In fact, when I met Tom Kenny at a convention shortly after Jerry Van Dyke's passing, I told him that I never treat celebrities as messengers, but asked if he could do me a favor and give Bill a message for me. He agreed, probably assuming that it was something about how much I loved the show. Instead, I asked him to give Bill my condolences on Jerry's passing.

His reaction was one of stunned silence.

I'm not sure if he was surprised I was familiar with Coach and their working relationship or if it was just so so outside the boundaries of what he expected me to say (or some combination of the two), but he eventually told me he'd pass my message along and indicated that Bill would be genuinely touched that I was thinking of him at that time.

During the interview, I don't think it's possible for my eyebrows to have gotten higher than they were when Barry mentioned how the execs asked if Jerry had ever been funny, While Coach (and appearances that followed, like Yes, Dear and The Middle) spring to mind first when I think of Jerry being funny, his role as Rob Petrie's sleepwalking, banjo-playing brother was one of my favorite moments from The Dick Van Dyke Show and is pretty high up there.

I know that the bulk of this reflection was about Jerry Van Dyke. I generally try to avoid reflections where I spend too much time talking about other people, though I get the feeling Barry probably won't mind.

That said, it's only fair that I tell another story that's directly related to Barry and this interview.

After the interview was over, I talked to Barry for a bit longer (as I do with some of my interviews). During that time, I told him a story that I'd like to share here.

My first semester of college, I had a public speaking course. One of the assignments was do a sort-of "partnered debate" speech. We'd partner up and each pick one side of an issue, then present our side in the hopes of convincing the rest of the class that we were correct.

Being…myself, I convinced my parner to go in on the topic of "The Bob Newhart Show vs. Newhart: Which was the better Bob Newhart-named sitcom?"

I was on the Newhart side.

Now, I'm not sure if you've ever tried to convince a room full of disinterested college kids that they should care about a 20+ year old sitcom that they had never heard of, but it went about as well as you'd expect.

Frankly, and this says way more about the class than it does about the show, I got nowhere, even after showing them a clip of Larry, his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl showing up to remove a presumed witch from the basement of the Inn.

That exchange—and even just the general idea of Larry, his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl—were so brilliant that they felt almost obvious.

But they only felt that way because we knew them, which is truly a testament to the writing that went into that show.