Bob Newhart was much more than a co-star to a no-talent clown in an awful movie that morons seem to enjoy.
How about years of standup, album recordings, 2 mega popular sit-coms in an age of good sit-coms?
Yes. The Elf reference was unfortunate.
You might think it was an awful movie but a lot of kids and many adults (or morons like me) loved it and Bob loved it too and knew it would become a classic Christmas movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVWHBHBLU80
And his appearance in that movie along with other more recent gigs, including as Professor Proton on The Big Bang Theory, kicked off a 2nd career at a time when a lot of actor/comedians of his age just didn’t get work.
And even more importantly the renewed attention meant that his stand-up classics are now available on streaming to a younger generation and his 2 previous sitcoms have a whole new audience to a younger generation who otherwise would never known who he was and they are very popular.
I’m in my early 60’s, and I barely remember The Bob Newhart Show from the early 70’s but I did watch Newhart in the 80’s. But for most people younger than me, the only thing most of them know him from is from Elf or The Big Bang Theory.
It’s sort of like when Jackie Gleason made those Smokey and the Bandit movies. A lot of kids back then, even “kids” my own age, in the late 70’s and early 80’s didn’t know who he was except for those movies. I only knew the Honeymooners from re-runs on a fuzzy UFH TV station when I was a wee little and home sick from school and I only watched that because I Love Lucy would come on next.