Robin, We Miss You Already

Every once in a while we lose someone who seems genuinely good, however troubled. Robin Williams seemed one of those good people.  He made us laugh and that’s a good thing in this increasingly absurd world. I really know little about his personal life. He has three children and as many wives.  He had addiction problems. But many have such problems. It is also not surprising that a comedian of his stature was troubled—Laugh clown laugh comes to mind. I often think that the true genius comedians, like Williams, are troubled folks and they use comedy as a way of communicating with a world that is, at best, troubled.

One can look almost anywhere in this place we call home—Earth—and find trouble. All over the Muslim world, from all of the Middle East and Africa to those sections of Asia that celebrate Islam, and you will find riotous behavior, even murderous behavior. In other parts of Africa we find disease—Ebola comes to mind—and such economic deprivation that people are desperately trying to leave to other parts.

In this section of our globe, we can observe children desperately trying to leave Central or South America to avoid being murdered by the anarchic gangs who roam there, virtually unhindered by any civilized force.

And here, in our wonderland called the US of A, we find the so-called 1% and their GOP serfs attempting at every turn to dismantle the structures that have made us the envy of the world. We can observe wealth so disproportionately distributed that we begin to run the risk of revolution by the masses.

So, Robin Williams observed all this weirdness and this nastiness and used humor to counter its most toxic effects, until perhaps he was overwhelmed by our global insanity. Maybe, he could take no more of it and declared OVER, FINISHED. It is at an END.

He was perhaps too civilized and too caring to continue living amongst us. He leaves behind many folks who cared about him and who now grieve their loss at his cessation, not the least his family, but also his adoring fans. We never met him, or even saw him personally, yet we were touched by him as by few others.  We will miss him. We know that all good things eventually end, but the endings are nonetheless sad.

Thank you Robin. We will miss you. You have now entered that night for which there is no morning. Goodbye old friend.

And Richard Vine of the Guardian compiled the following Robin Williams gags, which I reprint here as perhaps the best tribute to this comic genius.

 "Do you think God gets stoned? I think so … look at the platypus."

• "In England, if you commit a crime, the police don't have a gun and you don't have a gun. If you commit a crime, the police will say: 'Stop, or I'll say stop again.'"

• "If it's the Psychic Network, why do they need a phone number?"

• "People say satire is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House."

• "Cocaine is God's way of saying that you're making too much money."

• "I want to thank my father … the man who, when I said I wanted to be an actor, he said: 'Wonderful, just have a backup profession like welding.' Thank you."

• "We had gay burglars the other night. They broke in and rearranged the furniture."

• "I suffer from severe dyslexia – I was the only kid on my block at Halloween to go trick or trout."

• "Cricket is basically baseball on Valium."

• "Politics: Poli, a Latin word meaning many; and tics meaning, bloodsucking creatures."

• "What's right is what's left if you do everything else wrong."

• "I wonder what chairs think about all day: 'Oh, here comes another asshole.'"

• "They call it freebasing. It's not free, it costs you your house! It should be called homebasing!"

• "Dubya doesn't speak while Cheney's drinking water. Check that shit out."

• "I walked into my son's room the other day, and he's got four screens going at the same time. He's watching a movie on one screen, playing a game on another, downloading something on this one, texting on that one, people say: 'He's got ADD.' Fuck that, he's multitasking."

• "Is it rude to Twitter during sex? To go 'omg, omg, wtf, zzz'? Is that rude?"

• "Death is nature's way of saying, 'Your table is ready.'"