Robin Williams

Robin Williams was an improvisational comic,  one of the hardest things I can imagine in show business, something that must be one of the most stressful ways to make a living.  Keeping that up as long as he did as frenetically as he did, making chaos an art form must have taken an unbelievable effort and which cost him continual anxiety.

Improvisation, in the little I've attempted, is like juggling things you can't see because they don't exist as you have to set them up and catch them.  The joke isn't a joke, it doesn't exist until the very end of the punch line and by then you have to be starting to create the next one.   You can never have the security of knowing exactly where it is going and every one of those jokes is a big gamble, done in real time, in front of a real audience that is watching you and concentrating on what you are doing.  In my life time I can only think of Jonathan Winters who did it better than Robin Williams did, but from what I know of his life, it took an enormous tole on him too.  I am pretty sure that Williams would have admitted that Winters was the superior practitioner of the art, he had the reputation for being generous.  Though, every creative artist being one of a kind, that comparison is very limited.  No one could have been Robin Williams better than Robin Williams.

It's especially sad when the price a comedian pays to be funny for a paying public turns out to be their life.  It happens often enough in real life so that, in the hands of script writers, it risks becoming a cliche.  But a real life is what script writers feed on, the real life is real, and real tragedy is always freshly tragic.  As someone of about his age who has been dealing with the most severe depression I've ever experienced over the last fifteen months,  I can sympathize with someone who is driven to taking their life, even as I am fairly sure that my religious belief will keep me from taking that action.   But when you're facing that chasm again, especially someone who has suffered from addiction and alcoholism and who probably suspects any pharmaceutical remedies will risk that alternative hell, and you're in your sixties, it can look even darker than before.  I only wish Robin Williams could have gotten relief from the terror of depression to do more of the good in life that he had accomplished even with that debilitating pain.   I hope more people can find what works for them and they can continue to both cope and have better days.