Robin Williams on why Sylvester Stallone threatened to murder Bobcat Goldthwait
For a job where success is measured entirely by the ability to make people laugh, comedians regularly end up making a lot of enemies on their way to the top. Robin Williams was never particularly controversial, although word did get around that he had some bad habits that infuriated his peers.
Many comics have alleged that Williams would attend shows with the express purpose of stealing jokes made by the performers onstage. This situation reached a point where several banned him from attending, knowing there was a high probability their best gags would be pilfered and incorporated into his act.
Comedian and voiceover artist Joey Camen even revealed that once Williams would steal a joke, he’d try to compensate the originator with a cash reward, but that didn’t make it any less palatable. As far as controversies in the world of comedy go, though, it’s not like he was out there making a name for himself as a terrible person or an artist who’d go out of their way to belittle, mock, or make life miserable for the targets of his humour.
Of course, theft is theft, but Williams never had anybody threaten to kill him. The same can’t be said of his friend and frequent collaborator Bobcat Goldthwait, though, who ran afoul of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars by making a habit of singling Sylvester Stallone out for scorn due to his lack of military service.
The pair worked together on 1991’s dramedy Shakes the Clown and 2009’s biting World’s Greatest Dad with Goldthwait in the director’s chair, and his fondness for tackling near-the-knuckle material endeared him greatly to Williams, especially where Stallone was concerned.
“He was always fearless,” the Academy Award winner told Total Film. “Like, he used to talk about Stallone, saying that he did all these Rambo movies, but during Vietnam, he got a deferment because he was teaching girls’ gym classes in Switzerland. Stallone sent him a message saying, ‘If I ever find you, I’ll kill you’. I went, ‘You have such balls.'”
While Goldthwait’s Stallone bit contains a heavy element of truth, it doesn’t tell the whole story. As bizarre as it sounds, the future Rocky and Rambo figurehead was indeed teaching physical education at an all-girls Swiss school between 1965 and 1967, when the Vietnam War was ongoing, but it wasn’t entirely true that he’d done so to avoid the draft.
Stallone was eligible to serve in the military and reportedly registered for the draft in 1969, but he was deemed ineligible on medical grounds due to the facial paralysis he suffered at birth that gave him his signature drawl. Goldthwait wasn’t lying, nor was he being completely honest, but Williams was nonetheless impressed that he infuriated Stallone so much he was being threatened with death.
