As a comedian, Robin Williams delivered a high-wire act of verbal dexterity balanced with an unpredictable physicality. A word or phrase appeared to set him off on a trajectory of free-association, delivering punchline after punchline. On stage, he appeared as a vital force that would push a joke as far as he could take it. But what many fans never realized was that Williams’ unstoppable energy, his ability to think and process at a lightning speed, his need to get the laugh, bled into both the public and private sectors of his life.
Williams said comedy is rooted in a ‘deeper, darker side’
When Williams died in 2014 at the age of 63, the world mourned a stand-up comic and Oscar-winning actor who could make them laugh – and think – due to roles in television and film such as Mork & Mindy, Good Morning Vietnam, Mrs. Doubtfire, Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, Jumanji, Aladdin, and The Birdcage. Audiences at Williams’ stand-up shows recall hilarity at the speed of an out-of-control freight train. According to good friend and occasional comedy partner Billy Crystal, doing a set with Williams “was like trying to lasso a comet.”
“For me, comedy starts as a spew, a kind of explosion, and then you sculpt from there, if at all,” Williams once said of his work. “It comes out of a deeper, darker side. Maybe it comes from anger, because I’m outraged by cruel absurdities, the hypocrisy that exists everywhere, even within yourself, where’s it’s hardest to see.”
“The urge to be funny… was so innate, almost like breathing for him, that if he didn’t get it out of his system, it would have affected his performance in a bad way,” Mark Romanek, who directed Williams in One Hour Photo, says in the documentary, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind. “I realized when he made people laugh that hard, he used to get a kind of high from it, an endorphin rush or something.” Crystal, also featured in the documentary, agreed. “It’s a very powerful thing for a lot of comedians. That laugh is the drug. … That acceptance, that thrill, is really hard to replace with anything else.
A quiet child, Williams understood the effect of a good joke
Williams had a reserved upbringing in an affluent Detroit suburb. “I was so f*****g quiet,” he recalled in pre-taped segments in Come Inside My Mind. “My father was very intense,” he said, adding his dad was not prone to outward emotion. Williams remembers seeing his father’s reaction to Jonathan Winters on The Tonight Show. “My dad was a sweet man but not an easy laugh. My dad lost it, and I went, ‘Who is this guy who made the great white father laugh?’” Humor was also a way to gain attention from his mother, a more receptive audience, he revealed.
He had discovered the joy of performing and the joy that comedy could bring to an audience. Williams’ early stand-up routines were frenetic as if he was trying to keep himself under control while at the same time giving his brain and body free rein to take the joke as far as possible. His breakout television role of Mork required the studio to enlist the work of an extra camera operator, as well as the three already employed, to ensure Williams’ antics would always be captured.
