I Can’t Get Robin Williams Out Of My Mind, And That’s A Good Thing For Comedy And Humanity Both

I wasn’t prepared for Robin Williams to die. Not then. Not like that.

None of us were, really.

When a celebrity dies in the social media age, we all rush online to share our own tributes and appreciations. But in the comedy community, whenever one of our own should fall, we tend to commiserate at the comedy club. Not just to share the tales we wouldn’t dare share with the world. More importantly, perhaps: Safety in numbers. Protect the funny flock. I’d seen and heard Williams hold court a couple of times in recent years at the Comedy Cellar’s “comedian’s table” (as seen on Comedian). But instead of hopping on the N train to Greenwich Village that August night in 2014, I took his death so hard I stayed home and went on a two-week bender, shutting off my phone and avoiding my laptop. Not my finest hours.

I did eventually pen my own appreciation obit for the comedy legend.

But four years later, after joining societal mourning for other all-time greats such as Prince and Tom Petty, victims of their own dependence on prescriptions to soothe their pain; then Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington, dual suicides that made us pause; and in quick succession this summer, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. There have been so many other victims of our national crises, our lack of understanding, empathy and treatment for addiction and mental health.

Watching the new HBO documentary on Williams, Come Inside My Mind, I couldn’t help but sigh upon seeing an outtake from Patch Adams, reminded that his co-star in that 1998 film, Philip Seymour Hoffman, had, like Williams, suffered from addiction, recovered to enjoy a healthy and rewarding career, only to succumb to his own demons and die too soon.

Too soon.

Those are our word choices, of course. How is it anyone’s choice when someone else has lived long enough, struggled long enough, shared long enough? As survivors, as those left behind, we selfishly wish the dearly departed had stayed just a little bit longer.

Especially when their gifts cheer so many more of us up.

I couldn’t know the pain Williams endured in his final year before committing suicide. Sadly, after watching the HBO documentary Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, none of us have a better idea.

We do see Billy Crystal tear up, recalling how Williams cried after revealing in one of their final encounters that he had Parkinson’s disease, and Crystal could see the fear in Williams then. We also see a clip of his dear friend Bobcat Goldthwait, the comedian/actor/director who served as best man at Williams’s third wedding (and directed the comedian in 2009’s World’s Greatest Dad), reporting that the comedian’s autopsy found Williams suffered at the end from Lewy body dementia.

His widow, Susan Schneider Williams, didn’t participate in the documentary, although you can read her heartbreaking account of “The terrorist inside my husband’s brain” in Neurology.

So, in a documentary speaking most of the time in his own voice, it’s foreboding to hear Williams tell one interviewer years ago about his lone fear: “I guess it’d be that fear that I was just becoming, not just dull but a rock. I still couldn’t spark. Then I’d start to worry.” If he suffered from burnout, that’d be almost as scary to him. “That’s a never-ending struggle.”

His son Zak tells us that when his father wasn’t making people laugh, he felt like he was failing at life.

That sounds like far too much of a struggle, especially when you pin that on yourself.

Marina Zenovich, who’d directed a similar biographical documentary about Richard Pryor, Omit The Logic, enjoyed access to so much never-before-heard audio and never-before-seen video of Williams from his younger days before he became a superstar as Mork from Ork. From old improv rehearsals to audio of a high-school sketch, and outtakes galore from his sitcom and movies. Combined with the amazing audio archives from several interviews Williams had given in the 1970s and early 1980s, it’s breathtaking and heartbreaking in the same way Kurt Cobain’s official 2015 documentary, Montage of Heck, makes even the most casual fan wish we all could turn back time and give the subject a collective hug.

But none of us can.

So we all feel equally powerless, whether or not we’re former friends and colleagues of Williams such as David Letterman, Pam Dawber, Eric Idle or Crystal.

Someone who watched him before and after a performance remained amazed at how Williams could turn his manic charm on and off. Lewis Black, meanwhile, performed with Williams on a USO Christmas tour in 2007, and described the star as “the light that never knew how to turn itself off.”

It doesn’t matter whether your favorite Williams movie was Good Will Hunting or Mrs. Doubtfire, Dead Poets Society or The Birdcage, Good Morning, Vietnam or Aladdin, or any of the dozens more that brought you to the cineplex over 35 years. Williams gave you all of himself whenever he hit the comedy stage, the sitcom set that required a fourth camera to keep up with him, or the movie production. He left it all out there to entertain us.

“That’s what’s exciting,” he says in the documentary. “The idea to explore creativity at any price, is what we’re dealing with as artists, comedians, writers, actors. You’re going to come to the edge. You’re going to look over, and sometimes you’re going to step over the edge, and then you’re going to come back, hopefully.”

Having the answers now doesn’t make it any easier to register his loss, to process the fact that he’s never coming back.

But I, for one, am grateful that his spirit, his drive and his joy will never leave my mind. I can channel Williams just as he once channelled Jonathan Winters. Whether that’s in real life or by calling up one of those movies, I can do that anytime I want, on demand. And so can you.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind on HBO NOW and HBO GO