“The truly unique guys don’t give a fuck”: Robin Williams’ defiant approach to being accused of plagiarism
Very few actors mastered the balance between comedy and drama quite like Robin Williams, and there will never be another.
Nowhere else are you going to find hit films like Mrs Doubtfire, Good Will Hunting, and One Hour Photo in the same filmography, but before he was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, Williams cut his teeth on the stand-up circuit.
Working primarily in San Francisco and Los Angeles, he sharpened his joke-telling and improvisational skills in front of audiences of people who had no idea that he was destined for the very top. This was how he broke into acting when he was spotted by a TV producer, which led to his breakout role on Happy Days as Mork the alien, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Unfortunately for the beloved funnyman, this period of his career comes with an asterisk. Over the years, a number of comedians have come forward to accuse Williams of stealing their material. This practice wasn’t just limited to his stage work, as performers would allege that he would use their jokes on his television shows. According to voiceover artist Joey Camen, who shared the bill with Williams at numerous Comedy Store venues, the Oscar winner paid him $300 to keep quiet about a joke he’d stolen from him that ended up in the pilot episode of Mork & Mindy.
Joke theft is the most serious accusation one can make towards a comic. Naturally, Williams defended himself against these heinous claims. Speaking on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron in 2010, he admitted that he might have borrowed from other stand-ups, but that he wasn’t doing it intentionally.
“If you hang out in comedy clubs, when I was doing it, almost 24/7, you hear things,” he explained via Cracked, “If you’re improvising, all of a sudden, you repeat it, going, ‘Oh shit’. My brain was working that way.”
Addressing the comments that he paid people off, Williams clarified that this was only ever done retrospectively. “I was also like the bank of comedy,” he continued, “I went, ‘Oh shit, here, here you go, here’s money, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that. Oh shit’… And then after a while, I went, ‘I bought that line already. I’m sorry’. And then you have to pay again.”
He also claimed that he would eventually stop going to certain clubs altogether to avoid the ire of those who felt he had wronged them.
We’ll never know for sure if Williams really was a prolific material-stealer, but this whole ugly debacle just feels so pointless. Even if he did lift bits and pieces here and there, he was still one of the most powerful comedic forces to have ever graced the planet. Nobody could deliver a line as he could, and his zany characters are among the most recognisable in comedy history. He was so obviously talented that, if he was stealing jokes, he definitely didn’t need to.
As Williams himself once said, “The truly unique guys don’t give a fuck”.
