Newman found mainstream fame with The Mary Whitehouse Experience before forming a successful partnership with one of the programme's other comedians, David Baddiel, in the early 1990s.

Newman attended a comprehensive school, received poor A-level grades and was not offered a place at university until two years later, when he was admitted to Selwyn College, Cambridge, to read English on the strength of an essay about T. S.

[3] Newman began his comedy career as an impressionist in the late 1980s before gaining fame when he appeared alongside fellow Cambridge alumni David Baddiel, Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt in the BBC radio and TV programme The Mary Whitehouse Experience (1989–92).

Unlike most double acts, their shows (both on TV and stage) were characterised by the two alternately delivering monologues, rarely appearing together except in sketches (most famously, History Today).

While Baddiel became part of the "new lad" phenomenon of the mid-1990s, fronting shows like Fantasy Football League, Newman largely disappeared from public life, reappearing with solo work marked by a clear social conscience and anti-establishment views.

[14] In 2006, Newman performed a new show, No Planet B or, The History of the World Backwards, at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north-west London.

[18] In 2015, his BBC Radio 4 programme Robert Newman's Entirely Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution attempted to challenge some of the concepts of Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene.

[21] Dwight Garner, an editor of The New York Times Book Review, reviewed The Fountain at the Centre of the World favourably, saying "I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if [it] became the talismanic Catch-22 of the anti-globalisation protest movement, the fictional complement to Naomi Klein's influential exposé No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies".