TEN HONEST STATEMENTS ABOUT ROBIN WILLIAMS

Robin Williams' career existed almost entirely in the span of my lifetime.   For a long time, he was a significant, but awkward figure for me, because he did a lot of stuff that just wasn't funny.   However, I think he merits a eulogy of sorts.  So here goes:

1.  I watched a lot of "Mork & Mindy" when I was a child.    I'm not lying when I say that the episode where their geriatric child played by Jonathan Winters hatched from an egg helped shape my understanding of actual human childbirth, because it forced me to ask my parents a lot of weird questions. 

2.  I saw Mrs. Doubtfire too many times in 1994.  At the time, I quickly came to resent the non-threatening bowl haircuts and overabundance of Aerosmith, but in hindsight, it's a pretty good depiction of the time.  Also, any movie that includes a cameo by Buster the Ape is fine by me.

3.  Robin Williams made some awesome movies, including "The Fischer King", "The World According to Garp", "Good Morning Vietnam", "The Birdcage" and "Good Will Hunting".  He also made "Bicentennial Man, "Jack", "RV" and "Robots".   I never saw any of those latter movies, but I judged his career for them. 

4.   The first time I saw Aladdin, I thought it was hilarious.  The hilarity tapered off after subsequent viewings.   There were a lot of subsequent viewings.   Now, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Aladdin is I hate that fucking movie, even though I haven't seen it in nearly 20 years.

5.   I have often said that I found Robin Williams funniest when he was on cocaine.   That really is a horrible thing to say.  I think a better way to put it would be, I thought he was funnier when I was a kid.   Which, coincidentally was at the peak of his cocaine use.   BUT it's not like I was watching a shit ton of his stand up material at that time. 

6.   Robin Williams had black guy and gay guy voices.  He did.  You know he did and I know he did.  We all know it.   You could argue, okay, maybe they weren't really racially charged or homophobic.  In an ideal world, maybe that could be just, like, a deep voiced guy and an effeminate guy.  But, ultimately, they still were black guy and gay guy voices, and anything I say to defend them is an excuse.   However, I also think it also says something about my own awkward relationship with race as a white dude that it makes me uncomfortable, because in a truly colorblind world, it wouldn't matter at all.

7.   I like the idea of liking "Dead Poets Society", but the last time I saw it, I was nineteen and actually found it kind of cheesy, ham-fisted and unforgivably affluent.

8.   Robin Williams is also partially responsible for my well-documented hatred of Sting.  You see, "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" is one of my favorite movies of all time.  It was the first film where I remember being keenly aware of just how amazingly shot it was.   Sting is in the film for approximately half a second.  Robin Williams has a substantially larger role.  Sting appears pretty early on in the closing credits.  Robim Williams seemingly doesn't appear at all.   For a long time, I thought that was a complete crock of shit.   It has since come to my attention that Robin Williams is credited instead as Ray D. Tutto.  But still, fuck Sting, man.

9.  The episode of Happy Days where Robin Williams first donned the Mork from Ork persona still kind of scares the shit of me.  Specifically, it's his slow motion finger gun.  Even as an adult, the idea of a Robin Williams alien being able to exert that much control over other people by pointing and making a simple, obnoxious noise makes me very uncomfortable.  Like, the ability clearly is not temporal in nature, so he's just fucking up Fonzie's neurological functions, and seriously, nobody should be able to fuck with Arthur Fonzerelli. Ever.

10.   Robin Williams was one of those people whose face alone could make me deeply uncomfortable.  It could convey a lot of emotion, but it also always seemed like a mask mugging for the camera, like it somehow existed in the Uncanny Valley despite being attached to a human being.