Skip to main content

Mr. Happy

By
I first saw Robin Williams at Gator Growl in 1982, a Florida pep rally so to speak.  I had never laughed so hard in my life.  The guy had most of those in the stadium bent over laughing for the one hour plus he took the stage.  He focused a little too much on his "Mr. Happy" that night for alumni who had brought their children, but that was signature Robin, poking fun at every part of himself.

Williams and Reeves at Julliard
For all his great performances, it was his unscripted moments that stood out.  Christopher Reeve recalled the time Williams burst into his hospital room before the first surgery on his spine, and in a heavy Russian accent said he was his proctologist and was there to give him a rectal exam.  Reeves said that was the first time he laughed since the accident.  Hopefully, he was heavily sedated so that it didn't hurt.  Reeves and Williams had been roommates at Julliard.

His appearances on Saturday Night Live, the Tonight Show, Letterman, etc. were always memorable, but one that stood out for me was when he burst in on an interview with Jonathon Winters, his "Comedy Buddha," at the 7:30 mark and the two took over the Late Show with David Letterman.  I can't help but think that Winters' death last year left a deep hole in Williams, who had long acknowledged Winters as his primary inspiration.

Williams and Winters in 2008
There have been many great comics over the decades.  The idea of the stand-up comic may have come from the UK but it is in America that it took hold.  Jack Benny is perhaps the king of the American stage with his signature dry humor.  In the 60s it became a form of political and social commentary, notably Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory.  By the 70s, sex became a dominant theme with some acts getting very raunchy, particularly those of Redd Foxx, who was one of the first stand-up comedians to parlay his routine into a situation comedy, Sanford and Son, toning down his ribald jokes considerably for television.

Saturday Night Live took the format, added sketches, brought in guest stars to light up the evening, having a great run between 1975 and 1980 that inspired NBC to bring back Laugh-In for one year.  This is where Robin Williams first appeared on television, before taking a guest role on Happy Days as an alien from the Planet Ork that would launch his own television show.  Jonathon Winters would make numerous appearances on Mork and Mindy.  The rest as they say is history.

Even when a movie misfired, Williams could always be counted on to give a memorable performance.  He was great as Teddy Roosevelt in Night in the Museum.  He seemed to have a penchant for presidents, taking on Dwight D. Eisenhower in The Butler and wonderfully mocking Ronald Reagan in a segment of Saturday Night Live, which he visited several times.

He won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting in 1998, but probably his best loved role was that of Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam.  He won the Golden Globe that year.  Like Cronauer himself, he would entertain troops when the occasion arose.  He became the Bob Hope of his generation.

In this wonderful segment of Inside the Actors Studio from 2001, Williams shares insights into his many faces and many roles, for the most part demonstrating them to a captive audience and host James Lipton.  He talks about his work on Awakenings, one of his more memorable films, and the time he spent with Oliver Sacks.  He expressed his great admiration for the neurologist and author, and said if he could be anything other than actor it probably would be a neurologist.  Sacks likewise was very much taken by Williams, as he tells about his time with him at the 2 minute mark of this video clip on the making of the movie.

Sacks and Williams on the set of Awakenings
As in movies as in life, Williams was an incredibly giving man.  He actively took part in the Make a Wish program, bringing cheer to many people just like he had Christopher Reeve all those years before.  We often forget that these funny men need cheering up from time to time as well.  It is very sad to see Robin Williams go.

His death has touched seemingly everyone, but no persons more than his family.  His three surviving children offer their touching tributes.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more