Robin Williams, RIP.
By this time tomorrow, there will be thousands of remembrances, and I am certain that adding mine to the pile won’t mean much. But I used to listen to “A Night At The Met” with my friends Randy and Joe the way other people listened to Bon Jovi. Comedians were my rock stars. Robin Williams was Springsteen.
Williams struggled with depression and addiction his entire life. There was never enough fame, never enough money, to heal that anxiety and insecurity inside him. This is from Wired, Bob Woodward’s biography of John Belushi, Williams’ friend. It’s 30 years old now, but it could have been written a week ago:
That’s the thing about working in what we call Hollywood, or anywhere in the arts: there is always the pressure to prove yourself, to perform again, to repeat the lightning-in-a-bottle trick you pulled off the last time. For some people, it is almost a physical weight, and it crushes them.
I’m not going to claim I have some special insight into what went through Robin Williams’ mind. This is just to say that I will miss him despite never knowing him, because I still have the greatest admiration for anyone who can be funny on demand, over and over. We need people who can make us laugh, and the world is missing another one today.