There are some very nice tributes on the 'net tonight for Robin Williams, a man who sure made a lot of people laugh. His was dependable comedy, which is why when it came time for Johnny Carson to book a lead guest for his last regular Tonight Show, he said, "Get Robin." He probably could have gotten anyone to sit in that chair but he knew no one was more reliable. And it says a lot for Carson that he didn't try to top his guest or prove he could be just as funny. He let him soar.
As I said, I hope you got to see Mr. Williams live. I don't think any of his TV appearances did him justice because there was a wonderful immediacy to him in person. I honestly don't know how much of what emanated from his mouth was spontaneous and how much was planned…but almost all of it seemed to come out of nowhere. When he was on, you paid attention. There was always something coming that you didn't dare miss.
I assume someone, maybe TCM, will quickly slap together a Robin Williams Film Festival…and while I wouldn't mind seeing Good Morning, Vietnam or Awakenings or a few others again, I'd rather see HBO re-air all his stand-up specials, especially that first one where so many people discovered him. It aired and was released on home video under a couple of different names but the most frequent seems to have been Robin Williams: Live at the Roxy, even though it was taped and not broadcast live. It's the one where in the end, he brings John Ritter up on out of the audience to do some improv and one senses a wide disparity between what Mr. Williams can do on a stage and what Mr. Ritter can do. You find yourself feeling sorry for Ritter because that was Robin's crowd, Robin's room and Robin's game…and no one else had a chance up there. (There's a poor quality video of it on YouTube. I'll let you find it.)
For a lot of us, that was our intro and we saw Robin get…well, I won't say funnier because he hit a ceiling on that special. Maybe "more polished" would be a better term. I liked on some of his later shows how he'd go into levels of self-parody, parodying himself and then parodying himself parodying himself and sometimes, he'd even parody himself parodying himself parodying himself.
People likened him to Jonathan Winters and the lineage was obvious. But he was also a unique performer who on stage took nothing seriously. How sad that it all ended so seriously today.