Read Online Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 by Emily Herbert - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Emily Herbert
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that. It finally came out in the public arena in 1989 when
GQ Magazine
wrote, ‘His reputation for taking jokes and quickly making them his own in unequaled, dating back to his sudden emergence in the sitcom
Mork & Mindy.
’ In fact, it pre-dated that. Some comedians not only accused him of blatant joke stealing but also refused to perform in front of him lest their material ended up coming out of his mouth.
‘When he walks into a room,’ the artistic coordinator of a prominent comedy club told
Rolling Stone
in 1991, ‘a lot of comedians don’t want to take the stage. I think Williams has got a huge cloud over his head, and I believe he’s held at arm’s length from the comedy community.’ However, comedienne Whoopi Goldberg sprung to his defence. ‘They made it sound as if Robin were taking their livelihood away,’ she said. ‘Comics do this all the time. Someone says a great line, and it stays with you, and you use it. We had “Make my day.” Everybody was saying it, is that theft?’
Williams himself always said one of his most famous lines – ‘Cocaine is God’s way of telling you, you have too much money’ – was given to him by a stranger. But it was a charge that rankled and did so for the rest of his life.
‘I’m not gonna sit here and plead not guilty,’ he told
Rolling Stone.
‘If you watch comedy eight hours a day, something will register, and it’ll come out. And if it happened, I said, “I apologize. I’ll pay you for this.” But I wasn’t going out of my way to go fucking grave robbing. ’Cause if you’re on top, they’re gonna look for your ass. Then I started getting tired of just paying, just being the chump,’ he continued. ‘I said, “Hey, wait a minute. It’s not true.” People were accusing me of stealing stuff that basically was from my own life. And then I went, “Wait, this is fucking nuts. I didn’t take that. That’s about my mother.” A lot of comedy clubs are like Appalachian encounter groups,’ he went on. ‘Everybody’s doing everybody else. You can go into a cluband see fifteen different people, and they’re all chewing each other apart. You say, “Hello, you prick. That’s mine. I wrote Hello.”’
So there was some professional jealousy going on but, eventually, so much so that he began insisting on standing outside a club before he went on to perform so that no one could ever accuse him of stealing their jokes. ‘It’s something I do now as a conscious effort, so no one can fucking accuse me. I’m not into necrophilia,’ he told
Rolling Stone.
‘I don’t need to go back and take “Oh, God, don’t you just hate it about those medic-alert badges.” Yeah, thanks. I’m taking that. That’ll really work. And there [are] lots of people who took entire mannerisms from me. It’s not something I can get mad about. It’s flattery. It’s great. When it happens the other way around, you’re just supposed to smile.’ It was true – he himself was to inspire a whole generation of comics. But this was to be a recurring theme and one that did not make life any easier.
However, on one front, things were looking up. In 1976 Robin was working in a bar in San Francisco when he met Valerie Velardi, who was a student at Mills College and working as a waitress to fund her way through her degree. The daughter of an Italian contractor, she came from New Haven, Connecticut, on the East Coast, and was the eldest of four. Her parents divorced when she was just twelve and Valerie assumed the role of mother after her real mother moved away. That might have contributed to her appeal for Robin. She was studying to become a dance teacher,having left it too late to become a dancer herself. ‘A good, tough lady,’ is how Robin described her to an interviewer and soon the two became an item. A month later they moved in together. She was to become Williams’ first wife in 1978, and the pair enjoyed a very stormy relationship.
But Robin wasn’t going to be
GQ Magazine
wrote, ‘His reputation for taking jokes and quickly making them his own in unequaled, dating back to his sudden emergence in the sitcom
Mork & Mindy.
’ In fact, it pre-dated that. Some comedians not only accused him of blatant joke stealing but also refused to perform in front of him lest their material ended up coming out of his mouth.
‘When he walks into a room,’ the artistic coordinator of a prominent comedy club told
Rolling Stone
in 1991, ‘a lot of comedians don’t want to take the stage. I think Williams has got a huge cloud over his head, and I believe he’s held at arm’s length from the comedy community.’ However, comedienne Whoopi Goldberg sprung to his defence. ‘They made it sound as if Robin were taking their livelihood away,’ she said. ‘Comics do this all the time. Someone says a great line, and it stays with you, and you use it. We had “Make my day.” Everybody was saying it, is that theft?’
Williams himself always said one of his most famous lines – ‘Cocaine is God’s way of telling you, you have too much money’ – was given to him by a stranger. But it was a charge that rankled and did so for the rest of his life.
‘I’m not gonna sit here and plead not guilty,’ he told
Rolling Stone.
‘If you watch comedy eight hours a day, something will register, and it’ll come out. And if it happened, I said, “I apologize. I’ll pay you for this.” But I wasn’t going out of my way to go fucking grave robbing. ’Cause if you’re on top, they’re gonna look for your ass. Then I started getting tired of just paying, just being the chump,’ he continued. ‘I said, “Hey, wait a minute. It’s not true.” People were accusing me of stealing stuff that basically was from my own life. And then I went, “Wait, this is fucking nuts. I didn’t take that. That’s about my mother.” A lot of comedy clubs are like Appalachian encounter groups,’ he went on. ‘Everybody’s doing everybody else. You can go into a cluband see fifteen different people, and they’re all chewing each other apart. You say, “Hello, you prick. That’s mine. I wrote Hello.”’
So there was some professional jealousy going on but, eventually, so much so that he began insisting on standing outside a club before he went on to perform so that no one could ever accuse him of stealing their jokes. ‘It’s something I do now as a conscious effort, so no one can fucking accuse me. I’m not into necrophilia,’ he told
Rolling Stone.
‘I don’t need to go back and take “Oh, God, don’t you just hate it about those medic-alert badges.” Yeah, thanks. I’m taking that. That’ll really work. And there [are] lots of people who took entire mannerisms from me. It’s not something I can get mad about. It’s flattery. It’s great. When it happens the other way around, you’re just supposed to smile.’ It was true – he himself was to inspire a whole generation of comics. But this was to be a recurring theme and one that did not make life any easier.
However, on one front, things were looking up. In 1976 Robin was working in a bar in San Francisco when he met Valerie Velardi, who was a student at Mills College and working as a waitress to fund her way through her degree. The daughter of an Italian contractor, she came from New Haven, Connecticut, on the East Coast, and was the eldest of four. Her parents divorced when she was just twelve and Valerie assumed the role of mother after her real mother moved away. That might have contributed to her appeal for Robin. She was studying to become a dance teacher,having left it too late to become a dancer herself. ‘A good, tough lady,’ is how Robin described her to an interviewer and soon the two became an item. A month later they moved in together. She was to become Williams’ first wife in 1978, and the pair enjoyed a very stormy relationship.
But Robin wasn’t going to be
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