Photo: Fred Prouser/ReutersI never got to speak to Robin Williams; I merely watched him try to learn how to juggle balls and hats. Thanks to that childhood memory, my abiding image of Williams is that of the quietest man in the room, with a shy smile, nodding gratefully to his teacher and wholly focused on practice.
As a boy on the set of Robert Altman’s Popeye, where my mother worked, I found the area around the rehearsal room to be the most interesting. If nothing was going on, there were plenty of nearby mud hills to scramble over and see how far I could go without getting stuck. But usually I could linger with profit: study different actors as they went through the paces or, just as intently, time my raids on the well-stocked donut tray so that my intake remained within the bounds of decency, which I defined as never knowingly out-eating the cherubic Scott Donovan or the giant Peter (‘Big Pete’) Bray.
It was into this makeshift hut that Williams made his way a few times while I was there, leaning beside the doorway. Once he came to go over a fight scene with Donovan and Bray. It was Donovan (playing Olive Oyl’s brother, Castor) who took the lead and demonstrated the moves. But mostly I saw him taking instruction from his fellow actor, Bill Irwin, in how to keep changing hats, from head to right hand to left to head again, in one seamless motion – and then to practise alone on the side of the room.
I’m not sure any scene in the film had Popeye juggling hats, or, whether it was meant to be but ended up on the cutting room floor. It’s just as likely that Williams wanted to take advantage of Irwin’s knowledge of circus tricks.
In any case, it shows us the essential flip side of the trademark Williams stand-up performance, freeform, madcap, high-octane, which has been much remembered over the past week since his tragic death was announced.
The accolades about his originality have underlined his innate genius. However, this is a misleading term if it makes us forget just how much of his talent rested on hard work.
One of the three pillars of his originality as a stand-up comic is his classical training as an actor. I am not sure there has been any other leading comic with such a background. Let us remember that it gave Williams the standing, as an actor, to share scenes with Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino and, yet, not be outshone.
The accents, the movements – zany but coherent and legible – the mobile face: these all owe much to his advanced classes at Juilliard, which included training in dance and masks. Part of his humour consisted of the incongruent juxtaposition of classical cadences – say, Shakespearean iambic pentameter – with smutty interaction with his audience.
This classical background was an important source of his improvisational technique. He did not invent out of nothing, even when in full flow of free association. His riffs are based on the technique of oral poets: drawing on old material in new pleasing iterations.
One can trace a seemingly spontaneous joke (a gesture, really) which, in 2001, cracked the audience up during his appearance on In the Actors’ Studio, all the way back to his 1978 performance at The Roxy Theatre.
None of this means that he was neither inventive nor spontaneous. It’s to point out that his spontaneity, like that of all artists, flowed from technique that had become second-nature. His improvisation flowed from a language of comedy that he had himself created. The portraits of mad disorder would have been impossible without the disciplined order of art.
As a performer, Robin Williams was a poet of order emerging out of chaos
Frank Caliendo, one of the greatest living impressionists, has described the Williams theory of comedy as the idea of using a funny voice when you don’t have a joke. Well, not quite.
A performance in which being funny did not depend on slapstick or telling jokes was developed by Williams’s hero, Jonathan Winters (1925-2013). Winters was able to make something hilarious just by using the right voice imbued with the right personality.
Winters deliberately set out to do this to put his America on show. Winters was at pains to say that the voices and personalities that came tumbling out of him were all of people he had known. They were often heavily caricaturised but Winters’ point was that he impersonated these people not to ridicule them but because they were part of him.
The second pillar of Williams’s originality is how the late US actor adopted this stance. This distinguishes him from many other great stand-up comics, whose stance depends on detachment from the scene they observe wryly – whether their standpoint is suave (Johnny Carson), cynical (Groucho Marx), ethnic (Richard Pryor), political (Mort Sahl) or solipsist (Steve Wright).
The voices and personas that tumble out of Williams in performance, bobbing in and out of his orifices, really are part of him. He loves them, even George W. Bush, whom he lampooned with gusto.
There is an engagement and warmth to his performances that made it possible for Williams to go where few comics had gone before. It’s the quality that the cartoonist, Eric Goldman, who animated the film Aladdin, highlighted about Williams. No other actor, Goldman said, could have made the Genie so warm at the same time as making him domineering and manipulative.
This much Williams learned from Winters. But where the latter’s America was largely white, rural and suburban, Williams incorporated multi-ethnic America and also the non-human world.
Cats, racoons, even thunderstorms are given a speaking part in his Weapons of Self-Destruction tour. Other comics do this. But few have managed to make them seem like an extension of self. Williams manages this as well as G.K. Chesterton does in writing. Chesterton could write of the world from a dog’s point of view (‘the happy smell of water, the brave smell of a stone’); Williams could perform it.
It’s comedy of the ecological age. And in that sense it’s expansive. In another sense, however, it’s fragmenting. A Williams performance, in which even different human organs have separate personalities, can seem to dissolve the rational self into a multiplicity whose sum is madder than its parts.
It was a comedy for the age of multiple selves, where the insulation of different parts of our lives – work, family, leisure – gives rise to an everyday sense of different voices within us clamouring for attention.
The third pillar of Williams’s originality is how he enacted this experience, a couple of degrees over the top. The greatness of his achievement, when he managed it, was to suggest that the incomplete selves, jumbled together, vying with each other, pointed to a greater creative meaning.
Williams died horrifically, in extreme loneliness and despair, however, as a performer he was a poet of order emerging out of chaos.
ranierfsadni@europe.com