I need to back up a little and tell you that that night in San Francisco was the first night that I was humbled by Robin Williams, LIVE! But it was not my first exposure to Robin. That occurred about a year earlier on the short-lived NEW LAUGH-IN. I was still in Florida at FAU and while hanging out with some of my friends they switched on this show. This week was a different format though. Instead of the horrible revamping of the classic LAUGH-IN that would mercifully get them canceled in a few weeks. They did a concert style performance with all of the cast members doing their acts in front of a live audience in San Francisco. All I remember was this guy coming through the audience wearing suspenders and saying things to the people very fast and everyone was exploding in laughter.
Everyone was laughing but me. I was having one of those moments like Billy Crystal ’s character had in Mr. Saturday Night when he watched Milton Berle on TV. I was watching this man perform and on some level I knew that he was doing everything that I ever wanted to do on stage and doing it better than I could ever do it. I certainly was not able to verbalize or even acknowledge these feelings. Now that I think back on it this was probably the moment where my pot consumption increased significantly. Obviously I didn’t use this as an excuse to give up. I was like a guy with a 4-inch penis when he sees a guy with 9 inches in the locker room. It doesn’t mean he is going to give up having sex, it just means he knows someone has a bigger dick than he does.
About 9 months later, after I had moved to the Chicago area I had a dream. It was almost a vision really. In this dream I was on stage. There were actually 2 images of me onstage. Each image transparent and ghost like, and they were attempting to intersect with each other. (Much like in the viewfinder of an old camera you would focus the camera by bringing 2 images together and when they perfectly intersected the camera was in focus.) As the 2 ghost images of me got closer and closer together the laughter got stronger and more powerful.
From the very beginning I have always noticed that sometimes when I am performing I am not wholly present, I am an observer. When it happens (and it happens during different parts of almost every show) I always try to shake it off and get focused. Usually I make eye contact with someone in the audience, force myself to GET GROUNDED. The more in the moment I can be, the more magical the experience becomes for the audience and myself.
So as these 2 images of me in the dream began to intersect everything I said was getting funnier and funnier, everything worked, I was completely in the moment, I was a great comic, I didn’t even need material, I was a GOD. That was my dream.
Well as I watched Robin live in SF that night for the very first time I saw that he was completely in the moment, everything he said worked. I knew then that he was going to be presence in my life for as long as I lived. My feelings for him have bounced around from Jealousy to Awe, to Envy, to Respect and when I finally met him a few times I really liked him. I have come to accept that at my best I am like the guy who invented the paper clip who was always going to have to compare himself to Thomas Edison.
One day in 1986 when I was in SF performing in my 5th and last SF Comedy Competition I went to visit Warren Thomas in the Hospital. He had a blood clot that was life threatening and he wasn’t able to enter the competition. (That’s ok he won the nest year). Well we were having this conversation and the subject of Robin Williams came up. As it always did whenever 2 comics were talking in SF in the 80’s. I said I thought Robin was fearless onstage and Warren said that he might have been fearless onstage but he thought that before a show Robin was filled with fear. Robin’s brilliance on stage had really set him up, because once he became famous he was required to be the funniest, fastest greatest comedian, EVERY NIGHT. He goes on and he is usually the last comic, the audience has seen everyone else do their best stuff. Robin gets introduced and the audience goes berserk, and he makes his way to the stage and he has to live up to expectation that he is the best and that it is all getting made up right there on the spot.
A word on Robin's Improvising. I believe that Robin is a genius and a master improviser. ( Jose Simon , a comic/improviser who use to work with Robin in a SF Improv Group PAPAYA JUICE, told me once that he had personally catalogued over a hundred Improv techniques, and Robin was a master at over half of them.) But I always felt that Robin's greatest skill is he can improvise material with a level of confidence that you think it is written down somewhere. And then, in the same breath, he can throw in a piece of written material and make it seem totally improvised. The point is it is all seamless.
The comment that I always hear about now is "yeah but how much of the material is his and how much of it is lifted". I don’t think Robin ever consciously went on stage saying to himself "I am going to do so and so's bit.” But obviously there have been times he was searching for something to say and after he said the joke he needed to drop down on one knee and provide a comedy footnote about the source of the line. But I think that is mostly in the past, he made financial restitution where it was possible. And if you have ever seen him do what he does, live, you cannot hold it against him.
I will say that I have probably been around Robin a few dozen times in my life, he has never been anything but cordial and engaging off-stage, and remarkable on-stage.
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
About Lucien
