Robin Williams is dead

. . . I've had the hawk-turd on ignore for ages now
mainly so I won't be tempted to fall into the trap of reading
and responding to his idiotic inanities. . . .

shoot him!

I couldn't stand to watch Robin Williams. I don't mean this in the sniffy sense of an asshole contrarian saying "Eh, he was not so special" hours after a man's death; he was so special—that's the problem. His default manic-improv mode—which, as confirmed by myriad remembrances, tickled, pleased, and even uplifted millions—always made me recoil in horror and shame. The reason for this reaction was simple, and retroactively clear: Williams’s mania seemed to mask extreme, sustained, and infectious despair.

Perhaps “mask” isn’t even the right word. Some comics use the spotlight to exorcise their demons; Williams used his to feed them. Taken one at a time, his improvisational glissandos were often inspired, just as often clichéd, and increasingly hoary as time bore on: Schwarzenegger, a swishy gay guy, a “ghetto” “black” voice, a burst of Yiddish, a fifth-grade double entendre. (Just think what he would have done with the words “tickled, pleased, and uplifted” in the above paragraph.) What made these bits terrifying, at least to me, was the intensity of their aggregation. Taken together, they constituted more of a tic than a schtick, a curtain of compulsion that nearly obliterated the need to communicate as oneself, which the world proceeded to applaud. Of course, this switched-on, impressionistic style was mainstream at the time when Williams started out—Pryor's, Midler's, and Minnelli's routines all use it—but no one took it as far and held on to it so tight as Williams did.

Norm Macdonald, one of my comedy heroes, tweeted a sweet encomium of Williams that’s accidentally illustrative of this. Decades ago, Macdonald was about to go on Letterman for the first time, and terrified to follow Williams; seeing this, Williams kindly stuck around to distract and console him for half an hour, apparently without saying a single word as Robin Williams. Instead, he did a Jewish tailor (complete with “which way do you dress?”) and a prolonged phone routine pretending to be a Chinese waiter. I feel pretty safe saying that, of the two men in the green room that night, the one more terrified was not Norm Macdonald.

Post-Aladdin, Robin Williams managed to relegate this persona from film to stage, voiceover, and promotional appearances (his late-night interviews, in particular, always seemed to build to him miming a giant penis). On the big screen, he gradually embraced a kind of twinkly-eyed, post-rehab mawkishness. It got him accolades, and an Oscar. Yet I still tensed up at it, waiting for the slip-up—a funny voice here, a quick impression there—the compulsion now mine as much as his. (I wonder if more viewers won’t feel the same now, the way one can no longer help zeroing in on premonitions of malady in Marty McFly’s twitchy charm in Back to the Future).

I certainly never saw the fear back then, and Williams was very clear that he believed comedy was his best therapy, but considering that fear eventually bound him up killing his creativity and convinced him to leave it may well be so.

Quote:

I couldn't stand to watch Robin Williams. I don't mean this in the sniffy sense of an asshole contrarian saying "Eh, he was not so special" hours after a man's death; he was so special—that's the problem. His default manic-improv mode—which, as confirmed by myriad remembrances, tickled, pleased, and even uplifted millions—always made me recoil in horror and shame. The reason for this reaction was simple, and retroactively clear: Williams’s mania seemed to mask extreme, sustained, and infectious despair.

Perhaps “mask” isn’t even the right word. Some comics use the spotlight to exorcise their demons; Williams used his to feed them. Taken one at a time, his improvisational glissandos were often inspired, just as often clichéd, and increasingly hoary as time bore on: Schwarzenegger, a swishy gay guy, a “ghetto” “black” voice, a burst of Yiddish, a fifth-grade double entendre. (Just think what he would have done with the words “tickled, pleased, and uplifted” in the above paragraph.) What made these bits terrifying, at least to me, was the intensity of their aggregation. Taken together, they constituted more of a tic than a schtick, a curtain of compulsion that nearly obliterated the need to communicate as oneself, which the world proceeded to applaud. Of course, this switched-on, impressionistic style was mainstream at the time when Williams started out—Pryor's, Midler's, and Minnelli's routines all use it—but no one took it as far and held on to it so tight as Williams did.

Norm Macdonald, one of my comedy heroes, tweeted a sweet encomium of Williams that’s accidentally illustrative of this. Decades ago, Macdonald was about to go on Letterman for the first time, and terrified to follow Williams; seeing this, Williams kindly stuck around to distract and console him for half an hour, apparently without saying a single word as Robin Williams. Instead, he did a Jewish tailor (complete with “which way do you dress?”) and a prolonged phone routine pretending to be a Chinese waiter. I feel pretty safe saying that, of the two men in the green room that night, the one more terrified was not Norm Macdonald.

Post-Aladdin, Robin Williams managed to relegate this persona from film to stage, voiceover, and promotional appearances (his late-night interviews, in particular, always seemed to build to him miming a giant penis). On the big screen, he gradually embraced a kind of twinkly-eyed, post-rehab mawkishness. It got him accolades, and an Oscar. Yet I still tensed up at it, waiting for the slip-up—a funny voice here, a quick impression there—the compulsion now mine as much as his. (I wonder if more viewers won’t feel the same now, the way one can no longer help zeroing in on premonitions of malady in Marty McFly’s twitchy charm in Back to the Future).

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/08/13/robin_williams_suicide_he_was_at_his_best_playing_a_villain.html

Michael Idov is the editor-in-chief of GQ Russia and the author of Ground Up, a novel inspired by this Slate essay about a coffee shop. He lives in Moscow.

I certainly never saw the fear back then, and Williams was very clear that he believed comedy was his best therapy, but considering that fear eventually bound him up killing his creativity and convinced him to leave it may well be so.

I don't want to turn this personal, but I deal with mental illness, luckily, its not as bad as when I was younger and I do take medicine, but its still there

His eyes speak volumes if you look closely enough. In all of his photos.