Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 by Emily Herbert Page B
Authors: Emily Herbert
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to the Los Angeles circuit, where he began to perform. And, as has been so very well documented since then, not least by Williams himself, he embarked on a journey of self-destruction, involving booze and drugs. He wasn’t the only one… During this time he found out about ‘drugs and happiness’ he revealed, adding that he saw ‘the best brains of my time turned to mud’.
The LA comedy club scene of the 1970s was to produce some of the finest talents in the American entertainment industry to this day. It is a mark of his genius that Williams stood out from the following, who all emerged round about the same time: David Letterman, Andy Kaufman, Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, Sam Kinison, Elayne Boosler, Tom Dreesen and George Miller. All were exceptional talents in their own right but Williams went on to eclipse everyone. Almost immediately he caused a sensation: ‘He seemed to be omnipresent back then and was a topic of discussion wherever he went,’ said the author Merrill Markoe. He was ‘a comedy cyclone. In his act, he was id, ego and super-ego all at the same time.’
Much has been written about Robin’s intense, utterly manic style of stand-up but in some ways it defies analysis, other than to say that the little boy who so desperately wanted the attention of his mother was not so eagerly begging for affection from the entire world. His performances went beyond energetic, beyond frenetic. Attimes they seemed dangerous, not because of the subject matter of the material (although it was often highly risqué) but because of what it said about the creator’s own mental state. Vincent Canby, the American film critic who, like Williams, hailed from Chicago, once said the monologues were so intense that his ‘creative process could reverse into a complete meltdown’ – a very prescient observation, given what happened at the end was almost exactly that. Robin himself tried to explain it: the flow of ideas was never-ending, he said, because something was always happening in the world for him to react to. Free association kept the audience interested. And so on.
Williams cited many early influences on his act, including Jonathan Winters, Peter Sellers, Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Lenny Bruce. The reason he enjoyed their acts was that not only were they extremely funny, they were also highly intelligent. All were as erudite as he himself, although it is saying something that none of them, not even Sellers, who Robin most closely resembled as an actor, was anything like as intense.
He particularly admired the work of Jonathan Winters, the improvisational comic who appeared in the hit sci-fi comedy TV series
Mork & Mindy
, who was also a bundle of energy with a huge gift for mimicry. Williams’ description of why he enjoyed him is a very apposite summary of his own work. ‘That anything is possible, that anything is funny… He gave me the idea that it can be free-form, that you can go in and out of things pretty easily,’ author, columnist andcritic Gerald Nachman quotes him as saying. That was true enough and, to a certain extent, anyone could do stand-up… But to do it well? That required a very rare talent and one that it was increasingly obvious that Robin was cultivating in spades.
And he adored working with Winters. ‘It was a joy,’ he said in 2013 in an interview on
Reddit
. ‘I believe I said in the Academy Awards it was like dancing with Fred Astaire but it was even better than that, because being around him, he would perform for anybody. There was no audience too small. I think I once saw him do a cat for a beagle. And I had the same experience watching
The Tonight Show
with my dad. Watching and laughing at Jonathan with my dad helped us become closer, very much so. My favorite Jonathan Winters’ one-liner is “Have you ever undressed in front of a dog?”’
Williams was also a huge fan of Peter Sellers, having heard him on the BBC Home Service radio programme
The Goon Show
, which was
The LA comedy club scene of the 1970s was to produce some of the finest talents in the American entertainment industry to this day. It is a mark of his genius that Williams stood out from the following, who all emerged round about the same time: David Letterman, Andy Kaufman, Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, Sam Kinison, Elayne Boosler, Tom Dreesen and George Miller. All were exceptional talents in their own right but Williams went on to eclipse everyone. Almost immediately he caused a sensation: ‘He seemed to be omnipresent back then and was a topic of discussion wherever he went,’ said the author Merrill Markoe. He was ‘a comedy cyclone. In his act, he was id, ego and super-ego all at the same time.’
Much has been written about Robin’s intense, utterly manic style of stand-up but in some ways it defies analysis, other than to say that the little boy who so desperately wanted the attention of his mother was not so eagerly begging for affection from the entire world. His performances went beyond energetic, beyond frenetic. Attimes they seemed dangerous, not because of the subject matter of the material (although it was often highly risqué) but because of what it said about the creator’s own mental state. Vincent Canby, the American film critic who, like Williams, hailed from Chicago, once said the monologues were so intense that his ‘creative process could reverse into a complete meltdown’ – a very prescient observation, given what happened at the end was almost exactly that. Robin himself tried to explain it: the flow of ideas was never-ending, he said, because something was always happening in the world for him to react to. Free association kept the audience interested. And so on.
Williams cited many early influences on his act, including Jonathan Winters, Peter Sellers, Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Lenny Bruce. The reason he enjoyed their acts was that not only were they extremely funny, they were also highly intelligent. All were as erudite as he himself, although it is saying something that none of them, not even Sellers, who Robin most closely resembled as an actor, was anything like as intense.
He particularly admired the work of Jonathan Winters, the improvisational comic who appeared in the hit sci-fi comedy TV series
Mork & Mindy
, who was also a bundle of energy with a huge gift for mimicry. Williams’ description of why he enjoyed him is a very apposite summary of his own work. ‘That anything is possible, that anything is funny… He gave me the idea that it can be free-form, that you can go in and out of things pretty easily,’ author, columnist andcritic Gerald Nachman quotes him as saying. That was true enough and, to a certain extent, anyone could do stand-up… But to do it well? That required a very rare talent and one that it was increasingly obvious that Robin was cultivating in spades.
And he adored working with Winters. ‘It was a joy,’ he said in 2013 in an interview on
. ‘I believe I said in the Academy Awards it was like dancing with Fred Astaire but it was even better than that, because being around him, he would perform for anybody. There was no audience too small. I think I once saw him do a cat for a beagle. And I had the same experience watching
The Tonight Show
with my dad. Watching and laughing at Jonathan with my dad helped us become closer, very much so. My favorite Jonathan Winters’ one-liner is “Have you ever undressed in front of a dog?”’
Williams was also a huge fan of Peter Sellers, having heard him on the BBC Home Service radio programme
The Goon Show
, which was
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