“His bearing is intensely Zen and almost mournful, and when he’s not putting on voices he speaks in a low, tremulous baritone—as if on the verge of tears—that would work very well if he were delivering a funeral eulogy. He seems gentle and kind—even tender—but the overwhelming impression is one of sadness.”
That impression, which comes from a 2010 Guardian profile of Robin Williams, is one that many of us are now integrating into our sense of who Williams was—as an entertainer, as a man. He was Mork from Ork and he was a shy kid from the Detroit suburbs. He was the world’s greatest golf explicator and he was, at age sixty-three, a suicide.
In a 2002 review of Williams’s performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Beacon Theatre, John Lahr wrote, “Even in absurd and evil times, he’d given us a dazzling firsthand experience of what he was now struggling to explain: the sense of joy in being alive. On reflection, maybe what Williams was trying to suggest by smudging his otherwise sharp stage act was that he, as well as the show, was unfinished. Maybe that was the point of his joking to me, over the phone, in an announcer’s voice, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome a work in progress.’”
It’s painful to realize that Williams’s progress—through joy, through sadness—is complete. But what a pleasure to return to the dispatches he filed along the way. I saw him once on Broadway, in the role of a murdered Bengal tiger. It was a fierce, intelligent performance—and while it was in the service of drama, “fierce” and “intelligent” also describe his comedy. He was as good a political comic as we’ve seen since Carlin. And he had, from the start, a spark of madness.
I had thought I would end this remembrance with those twenty-four seconds of madness. But then I happened upon something even stranger: a leisurely paced tête-à-tête with a gorilla. Williams appears, indeed, gentle and kind. And he laughs. And he makes the gorilla laugh.
He could make anyone laugh. Rest in peace.
