A Gift to the World

Robin Williams, 1951-2014 (Time photo)

We started watching Mork & Mindy in the late 1970's and became instant fans of Robin Williams. We had seen improvisational comedy on Saturday Night Live and the Carol Burnett Show, but those TV classics could not consistently sustain their performances. Robin Williams was always funny. (Wikipedia: "Williams would make up so many jokes during filming, eventually scripts had specific gaps where Williams was allowed to freely perform.")

In his subsequent HBO specials, audiences marveled as he flitted from subject to subject in different voices and characters, comedy on a high-wire sans net. When he appeared on Carson, Letterman, or Leno, we always tuned in. Viewers did not know what to expect, and neither did the hosts.

Robin Williams was that rarest of performers. He couldn't be imitated: [bold added]

Most comics, then and now, honed their routines to letter-perfection. A few courted inspiration, and risked failure, with solo improv comedy. Mad-professor types like Brother Theodore and Irwin Corey turned their performances into rant-lectures that disdained punch lines and spiraled into twisted logic. Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor were hipster social critics following their own elevated radar. Jonathan Winters, a Carson favorite (as dear Maude Frickert), was closest to Williams: he pirouetted from character to character, emitting more weird noises than a Warner Bros. cartoon soundtrack. The true brethren of these brilliant misfits were not stand-up comics but the most adventurous jazzmen. And if Bruce was the Louis Armstrong of solo improv comedy, and Winters the Charlie Parker, then Williams was Sun Ra, the farther-than-far-out composer who claimed he came from Saturn.

Of course Williams had a notion of what he would say onstage and often played unannounced gigs at comedy clubs to hone his material. But the safety net of even a discursive narrative was too confining for all the voices waiting inside to burst out, like Linda Blair’s devils in The Exorcist, but hilarious. Williams took the anarcho-improv impulse and flew with it–a Robin reaching the surreal stratosphere. When everyone else was analog, he was digital. That’s why his comedy had many admirers but virtually no imitators. Who else could even think of doing that?

Robin Williams pushed both his body and mind to its limits. He leapt, twirled, and gesticulated during a rat-tat-tat performance. Sweating profusely and guzzling water (?), he kept it up for 90 minutes. It would not have been surprising if he had died young from substance abuse, as did his friend John Belushi. But he survived the early attacks of his demons; from that perspective the past 40 years was a gift to the world. © 2014 Stephen Yuen