Could you not like Robin Williams?

Robin Williams, C.S.Lewis and

the Demons That Drove Him

by Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Could you not like Robin Williams?

He’s one comedian and actor who always let you know he was on the edge, that there was a dark sadness beneath the zaniness. In this memoir British comedian Alexi Sayle recounted how Williams had the ability to switch from comedy to pathos in a moment:


On top of that, there was another quality Robin used in his act which I had never seen deployed by a comedian before, but it was one that raised him way above the mainstream. That quality was poignancy. Poignancy and sadness. To see a comic who didn’t strive every second for laughs made me feel dizzy; I’d never imagined such a thing was possible.

Later, in Los Angeles in the early Nineties, when we were talking together about the technical business of comedy, he told me how this had come about. At the start of his career he found he could slay audiences with his manic energy, but 20 minutes later he felt they did not really remember him, that his act had not made a lasting impression.

…Robin had a character, an old man who would feed the pigeons and talk about what had happened before World War Three. They persuaded him to do some funny lines in this character, but then to play him for real: he shouldn’t worry about getting laughs, but instead should leave the stage during a quiet moment. It was an incredibly brave thing for a comic to do, to walk off in total silence. This sent audiences crazy and they did not forget him after that.

Later on, you could see in his movie career that he would employ the same switchback of emotions, slipping from crazed comedy to authentic sadness within a split second, to remarkable effect. But for me, his best performances were those where he accessed the gnarled, black little creature who lives in the guts of every comedian, the moments when he chose to play sinister: One Hour Photo and Insomnia are unparalleled studies in cinematic nastiness.

This article ponders the tension between joy and despair that seemed to drive all of Williams work–calling it a “tightrope dance over the abyss.”

Williams seemed aware of the dark forces that drove him on. Sayle writes, “Robin said of himself: “It is not a muse that drives you on…It is a demon!”

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