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| Local boy did good |
“It’s a very large asylum. I can walk down the streets of San Francisco, and here I am normal.” – Robin Williams, 2007
THIS is a space reserved primarily for fun and games – which is a little strange, if you think about it, since this blog generally focuses on failing at games, which isn’t fun at all. Losing sucks. It’s the default setting in all competitions. If you don’t do anything, you lose.
The reasons for failure are numerous, of course, but often they come down to a lack of talent, a lack of execution, or a moment of downright, out-and-out stupidity which decides the outcome. And in the moment, of course, losing sucks ass, but in hindsight, it’s the source of what’s the funniest. The greatest stories in sports are told by those who survived the most miserable of seasons – be it the 1916 Philadelphia A’s, the 9-73 Philadelphia 76ers, or the 0-and-seemingly-forever Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whose coach, John McKay, when asked after a loss about his team’s execution, said “I’m in favour of it.” Casey Stengel never had to ask, “can’t anyone here play this game?” when his Yankees clubs were winning five consecutive World Series from 1949-53. His attempts at skippering the rudderless ship that was the 1962 Mets of 40-120 lore and infamy, however, has become far more memorable than any of his earlier managerial triumphs, achieving a folk hero status that success never could have brought. Hell, if you didn’t laugh when your team did dumb stuff like this, you would probably go insane.
Failure is funny, in the end. Failure shows weakness, vulnerability, and inability. It should therefore not be a surprise that the funniest persons we know are also often the most vulnerable and most susceptible. And no one has ever seemed more innately, inherently vulnerable to me than Robin Williams, who died at his San Francisco area home on Monday at the age of 63.
Robin Williams has always been a hero of mine, because Robin Williams taught me how to laugh. He taught everyone in my generation how to laugh, for that matter. He was an A-list star for three decades. Seeing that he was listed in the credits of a film immediately got your attention – even when he was a cold streak, which happens in moviemaking. Even in his bad films, there were still a few moments of genius. And even when he played a lesser role – or, in the case of Dead Again, an uncredited role – he threatened to steal the film with his mere presence. (And in the case of Dead Again, it wasn’t even a comedic role, but we will get Williams’ dramatic skills here in a moment.)
Robin Williams was a hero to all of us who strive to be funny at all times. Robin Williams was both a hero and the enemy in that arena – a hero because no one could do it better than he, and the enemy because no one could do it ever even hope to do better than he. No one was quicker with a quip than Robin Williams, a quip which would inevitably resonate on some sort of deeper, more cerebral level the more you thought about it. Not that you would have much time to think about it, since he was so quick that you’d be laughing about something entirely different in a matter of seconds. His sheer ability to generate one joke after another in quick succession was utterly amazing, and it all seemed to flow out of him almost naturally. Countless times as a guest on a late night talk show like Letterman or The Tonight Show, Robin Williams would upstage the other guests. It was never a selfish act, either – he simply couldn’t help himself. He seemingly had no off switch.
That he found the off switch himself is something that is deeply saddening, but not that surprising. Robin Williams took his own life on Monday. The sheriff’s reports on the scene are unsettling and disquieting, the details of which need not be repeated here. Robin Williams’ struggles with alcoholism, substance abuse, and mental illness have been well-documented over the course of 30 years in entertainment. One of his classic lines, culled from personal experience, was “cocaine is nature’s way of telling you that you have too much money.”
Robin Williams was a comedic talent like no one has known, nor is likely to ever know, but that talent sprung from a dark, dark place in his soul. He was the embodiment of the notion of a tormented artist. Many of his greatest roles in cinema, in fact, were characters in which his usual quick persona was coloured by that darkness. His villain in Insomnia was so creepy, and so effective, precisely because we knew him as a funny man from so many films before, and Robin Williams knew that and played upon that fact. He delivered every line in that film with the same aplomb as he would deliver a joke in a stand-up routine, only to repeatedly give the audience the back side of the hand.
As you have no doubt come to realize from reading this blog, will come to discover if you follow this shameless plug of a link, or this one, and buy one of those novels, I am someone who believes entirely, and wholeheartedly, in the value of humour. I find life and the world around me to be inherently funny. It is ridiculous and absurd and worthy of mockery. Laughter may seem to be an impulsive and emotional behaviour, but humour is, in fact, extraordinarily rational. It is an attempt at making sense, albeit one with which you draw a different sort of conclusion.
Even though I use the terms ‘black comedy’ and ‘dark comedy’ fairly frequently, I’ve always believed those terms to be redundant. We’ve come to define the word ‘comedy’ to simply mean something that which is humourous, At the root, a large part of what’s funny is black, dark, or borderline cruel.
I remember a moment many thousands of years ago, while heading to a Shakespeare class at Washington State University. It was December, there was snow and ice on the ground, students were scrambling about, and in among all of us traipsing through one of the plazas, a woman slipped on the ice, lost her balance, fell and splayed her cup of coffee everywhere, which caused the 10 or so people surrounding her, including myself, to immediately stop and see to it that she was alright. Well, seeing to her being alright was the 2nd thing that everyone did, the 1st thing being to laugh at her. And once she proved to actually be alright, she laughed right along.
It wasn’t mean-spirited, it wasn’t cruel, it wasn’t some act of reveling in schadenfreude. It was an instinctive response, because it’s not normal for someone to have their feet in the air and their ass over their head while walking through a plaza. Was it ‘funny,’ per se? Well, yeah, to be honest, it was. Would it have been ‘funny’ had I been the person doing the falling? Well, in grander schemes and greater contexts and over the course of time, yes, it would’ve been. In the moment, of course, I would’ve been embarrassed as hell – but one of the most fundamental emotions in comedy is embarrassment. It was Eric Idle who theorized that the appeal of Monty Python stemmed from there being something extremely appealing about watching such incredibly intelligent people behaving like idiots. He was onto something there.
Laughter is life’s best medicine. Laughter is life’s greatest coping mechanism. It is often the best way to respond to the horror that the world can present. I’ve always admired the work of Roberto Benigni, simply because he has made one comedic film after another in his career about subjects which are so horrible as to be almost considered ‘off limits’ to comedy. He makes comedies about mass murderers, about murderous mafiosos. His magnum opus, Life is Beautiful, proved that humour could even trump the Holocaust. Countless books (Catch-22) and films and television programs (M*A*S*H, Hogan’s Heroes) have attempted to portray and explain the darkest periods of human history in terms of how far they can move the needle on the Laugh-o-Meter. The reason the cliché of I Pagliacci – the clown who paints a smile on his face and is so sad beneath it – exists in the first place is that those were the only sorts of people who were any good at it. Wherever there is darkness, cruelty, and evil in the world, comedy is never far away. Les extrêmes se touchent, as the French say. The extremes come together.
And for comedians, there is often no difference between the good and the evil at all. Humour is inherently a performance. It is artificial. In order to make you laugh, I usually have to do something outside what is my normal way of being. I am, thus, pretending to be someone I am not. And for those of us who strive to make others laugh, it becomes all that we do after awhile. This explains, to some extent, why so many of the funniest people we know turn out to be so ‘troubled,’ which is a word often used in the media to explain it. It is a constant state of release and relief, going about pretending to be someone you are not.
For those of us who struggle with mental illness, Robin Williams’ succumbing to his own is, inevitably, a reason for reflection. For those of you who do not know me all that well, I have struggled with mental illness my entire life. I was born with it, it is a part of me, it has played a predominant role in my existence and, often, proven to be debilitating and nearly fatal. I’ve been hospitalized for it, medicated for it, and very nearly succumbed to it. It’s taken an entire lifetime to learn to live with it, and even then, I know that there will never be a cure. My existence is a day-by-day, moment-by-moment act of case management.
I’m somewhat impressed, in fact, that Robin Williams even made it to the age of 63. Living with a memory such as this, in and of itself, seems like it eat away at even the healthiest of psyches. And a good number of depressives meet untimely, and early ends – perhaps it is suicide, perhaps an overdose, or perhaps through an accident where a lifetime spent struggling with the pains one feels makes self-care difficult. Depressives become reckless, they takes risks, they can come to lose that self-preservation instinct. Why save yourself, when it’s so readily apparent that your own body is attempting to kill you? It can seem miraculous, at times, that you’re even alive at all.
And see, it’s that sense which builds up within that is difficult, if not impossible, for a good number of people to comprehend. Asking the question, “why did Robin Williams kill himself now?” completely misses the point. When you struggle mightily with depression and other mental illness, the cumulative effects of a lifetime of oneself generating negative thoughts, emotions and feelings makes it such that any time could be the time. There is a threshold of misery there, a line you cross which renders each passing day to be nothing more than another day borrowed. So Robin Williams committed suicide on August 11, 2014. It could have happened on any day, most likely, in the past 40 years, if not longer. Once you cross that threshold, and touch the void on the other side, it’s no certainty that you’ll ever truly come back. There comes a point where you feel like you’re simply holding back what’s inevitable, and that day just may come when you feel as if you no longer have the strength to fight back.
And not all depressives wear black and listen to The Smiths. Some of the most loving, ebullient, beautiful people I know suffer from mental illnesses of one sort of another. Some learn to manage it, while others learn to hide it really well. You do a lot of hiding, a lot of pretending. The most difficult thing to do, after a while, is to stop doing that.
Robin Williams is my hero because he did something, in his work, which was far, far harder than I could ever do, nor most comedic actors could ever do, which was to allow that dark side of him to be more than just a well-spring for his work. His best work had that depth and texture to it, something which many comic actors fail to adjust to. It’s one thing to show up at the set or on the stage and put on your usual routine in your usual persona. It’s another thing entirely to truly be angry, be bitter, be petty and cruel and sometimes evil and create that experience for others. It’s somewhat paradoxical – in order to be a solid dramatic actor, the comedian often has to stop acting.
And I know I could never do that. It makes me a half-assed artisan, I suppose. I’ve spent 10 years – 10 fucking years – working on a novel. It is a very complex piece, and I’ve probably written about 500 pages’ worth of material during that time. Some of the best work I’ve ever done, in fact. And it was dark. Very dark. It dealt with some issues and subject matter that I’d never imaginged writing about. And it was good, too. It was really fucking good. It verged on being scary, that’s how good it was.
And then I threw it away. I threw it away because I realized that, while the story was entirely fictional and the characters conjured up from scratch, I couldn’t even bring myself to subject even a fictitious person to that. And so I junked it and wrote a comedy, instead. Why fill the world with any more misery and sadness? We already have enough of that. I already carry around enough of that sludge to begin with.
And, see, that’s the mindset of the comedic if you put a pen in their hands or a mic in front of them. They will attempt to make you laugh, rather than wish to directly spread the unhappiness and the suffering within them. That unhappiness is innate, and no amount of external stimuli will necessarily change that. You’re still walking around, carrying around all of this sludge about with you. That burden is still there. That pressure is still there. It doesn’t ever truly go away. And that’s not ‘normal.’ The ‘normal’ people that you know do not feel that way. They are often incapable of even comprehending what that feels like.
You feel, in short, like a loser.
I remember reading a profile of Robin Williams some years past – maybe a decade, maybe a longer – in which he and the writer go mountain biking in Marin County, and Robin Williams constantly races away from the reporter, leaving them far behind. It was as if it were a race, a competition that he had to win. Keep in mind that he is one of the most successful entertainers of his generation, maker of multimillions and winner of an Oscar, etc. Robin Williams should be considered an unqualified success. He shouldn’t have anything to prove at all. What difference would some recreational bike ride ultimately make?
But in the realm of a game, however, I’ve known quite a few depressives over the years who were absolutely vicious competitors. You focus entirely, you target that moment and put every ounce of your effort into it, augmented by a healthy amount of pent-up aggression. And it doesn’t matter if you’re ill-prepared or don’t know how to play or what have you. In that moment, you absolutely, positively have to win. Sports and games constitute another form of escape, a chance to disprove the idea that you are flawed. Winning disproves that notion, losing simply cements it.
But losing is also funny. And, as I say, losing provides a wealth of source material. Failure, and the fear of it, is good for business. It provides steady work. And no honours nor plaudits nor successes were ever going to permanently dam that flow.
The internal world Robin Williams personally inhabited was clearly not a funny one. That other world, the one he shares with the rest of us mere mortals, is now a whole lot less funny that is was just a few days ago. Maybe what needed to happen is that, instead of laughing with him once again, we all had a good cry together, instead. I once laughed until I cried while I was institutionalized. I laughed so hard that the tears began to flow, and then I felt bad for laughing so hard.
“Shouldn’t being crazy suck?” I said. “Being crazy isn’t supposed to feel so good.”
Robin Williams is my hero of the week for constantly reminding me, in the past three decades, that being crazy doesn’t have to suck. If nothing else, you have a gift in that you have a unique perception and insight, a way of seeing things which others cannot when, shaped correctly, can create art and literature and that which is beautiful and timeless. If nothing else, you can bring some joy and lightness to everyone around you. If you cannot find that joy within, spread it elsewhere. There is a value in that act which you cannot put a price tag on. A depressive life is often one filled with drugs of every sort, but if nothing else, maybe you can make a few people laugh – laughter being the most precious drug of all, a drug that always seems to be in the shortest of supplies.
