Usually, when a comedian makes an album (or now a CD) of stand-up material, it's a recording of an act that he or she has performed for months or years around the country in front of hundreds of audiences. He's tested, refined, rewritten and perfected the routines and the album is the culmination of all that perfection.
This was not the case in 1960 when a then-young comic named Bob Newhart recorded what quickly became one of the best-selling records of all time. In no time at all, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart was number one on the Billboard Pop Album chart (beating out some guy named Presley) and it won Album of the Year at the 1961 Grammy Awards — the first comedy album to do that. Newhart also won as Best New Artist…still the only time a comedian has notched that honor.
This would have been an amazing achievement if it had been well-honed material. It was not. It was an act Newhart had recently written and he had very little experience performing it or anything in front of a live audience.
The whole story is told in a half-hour BBC radio documentary which you can hear at this link for the next six or so days. It's hosted by Paul Gambaccini, a popular broadcaster in the United Kingdom. Longtime comic book fans may recall his name from a lot of letter pages in the sixties, mainly in DC comics edited by Julius Schwartz. I was in some of those letter columns too and that still may turn out to be the greatest achievement of my life. Nice to see Paul has gone on to better things. And thanks to Jon Delfin for the link.