The soul-shattering moment Robin Williams didn’t think he was funny anymore: “Oh, god”
Self-belief and confidence are key to anyone who wants to make a living out of making people laugh, which left Robin Williams staring an existential crisis in the face when he thought he’d lost his touch.
He got over it, as the best comics do, but it was a sign that insecurities were beginning to creep in. A comedy actor can weather a few flops, as almost every big-name Hollywood star has proven at least once, but it’s much harder to come back from thinking you’re not funny anymore.
Audiences generally have strong bullshit detectors, and if someone is trying too hard to be funny, or they’re clearly phoning it in when their heart isn’t really in it, people can tell. That wasn’t the case for Williams, fortunately, but he did suffer an early setback when he thought his days were numbered.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that the former stand-up sensation was finally able to stand on his own two feet as a movie star after several false starts, when Good Morning, Vietnam earned him his first Academy Award nomination in what was far and away his best big-screen performance to date, but he’d already been struggling with the pressures of appealing to a wide audience.
When its first season concluded in May 1979, Mork & Mindy was the third most-watched TV series in the United States. By the end of the second season, it had slipped to 27th, and by May 1981, when the third season had run its course, it was down to 49th, only getting one more season before being cancelled.
In between the third and fourth runs, where he was picking up north of $50,000 per episode, Williams thought he might have been to blame. “That was kind of depressing at first,” he admitted. “Because I took it personally, thinking, ‘Oh, god! I’m not funny anymore.'” It was an understandable reaction, but the more he thought about it, the more he took the blame off his shoulders.
There were other mitigating factors, like Mork & Mindy moving timeslots, but as someone who had a major say in how their character was presented, not to mention the improvisational approach that was key to almost every comedic character he played, Williams was, at the very least, a little bit complicit.
“Parents got angry when we started doing all those sexploitation shows, written specifically to get little girls running around in tight outfits and me dressing in drag,” he mused. “That lost a lot of people who used to watch with their kids.” If anything, Mork & Mindy not overstaying its welcome turned out to be a blessing.
Had it run much longer than four seasons, Williams could have found himself pigeonholed as a sitcom actor, which would have made it much harder to break into cinema. That took a bit longer than he would have liked, but he got there eventually, and his popularity ensured that his fans wouldn’t accuse him of losing his inherent hilarity.
