At times, during my years of research for a book on standup comedy, I’ve tried to imagine what would have become of the standups I know if they hadn’t found comedy. They tend to be a wonderful, difficult, and rarefied breed. I am a civilian, though, so I still ask them. Most times, I get the same answer: “I’d be dead.” Comedians do their best to create the room that they need, and the fortunate ones find people who know how to cultivate their particular complexity—which often means letting that complexity run wild.
It’s difficult to imagine what would have become of Robin Williams had he not had full run of the stages and sets that he paced on and all the love he devoured—had we not been able to take what he needed to give us, again and again. Williams’s uncontainable singularity operated in multiple registers. He was speedy. He tore through characters. His verbal riffs looped around the circus of his stunning physicality. He sweated. During his 2002 comedy special, “Live on Broadway,” he drank ten bottles of water; most comics drink one.
The comedian Steve Pearl first saw Robin Williams in the late seventies, at the Holy City Zoo, a “little bitty dirty cabin” of a club on Clement Street, in San Francisco. Williams was a “tornado, frenetic and ripping all over the stage,” Pearl said. “It inspired and scared me at the same time.” It’s not so easy to scare comedians with intensity.
Fame transforms weirdness, and, lucky for us, Robin Williams became famous young. His surprise-hit guest appearance on “Happy Days” and the subsequent success of “Mork & Mindy” encouraged us to try to keep up with him. His intensity may have been exhausting, but we weren’t afraid. Yet, if he hadn’t been delivered to us on a spaceship, tutored on dating rituals by Fonzi, and paired with Pam Dawber—in ponytails, whose previous role had been as a streetwise nun—it’s not certain, despite his boundless talent, that Robin Williams would have found the welcoming space he needed to play out his multiple selves. He wasn’t one of us, but he absorbed what he saw. “Real thing, I had to zap your mind to make you forget,” were some of his first words to the Fonz. When a comic dies, his or her best bits are usually quoted most. It seems significant that one of the most popular clips recirculating since Williams’s suicide is his reading of a Whitman poem in “Dead Poets Society.” He contained multitudes.
Williams’s manic permeability may explain why ordinarily loudly wounded comics pretty much gave him a pass when he used their material. Perhaps, too, they let it go because Williams was himself a kind of frequency, flipping through impressions, riffing off of what he found suggestive, which sometimes seemed primarily about the sheer marvel of the speed of his concoction. The film roles he played, and his capacity to move among them, will be what he is remembered for, more than any particular material. Words were only one way he communicated all that he had to give over to the audience.
Two years ago, Robin Williams agreed to appear on Steve Pearl’s podcast, “Riff-erendum.” Williams called the improvisational character of Mork, and the freedom it gave him, “the break of breaks.” The resulting fame—landing on the cover of Time magazine—sprung open other openings, and he bounded through every one. “It was that weird thing,” he said. “You just kind of broke into open field running.” There was a trace of surprise at his good fortune. “It was like all the planets were in alignment. Or out of alignment.” The pause wasn’t in service of a joke.
Williams kept his own pace: eighty movies, twenty-six television shows, countless benefit performances, many friends, a large family, two divorces, addictions, rehabs, heart surgery. “He was living and operating at a pace that was ninety-five times faster than anybody else,” Mike Birbiglia told me. (He once watched Williams riff individually with a series of fans who’d come backstage after a benefit.) “He gave people the Robin Williams fantasy sequence that you would dream meeting Robin Williams could be.” The force of Williams moved him. “How much more could we want from that person? He gave us everything.”
