The Robin Williams joke that outraged an entire nation: “Damn, I offended everybody!”
While the objective of comedy is to make people laugh, some stand-ups like to see how they can push the boundaries of what’s acceptable to say to an audience. Robin Williams wasn’t one of those comics, but he did end up apologising for upsetting an entire nation with one gag.
Even when the stage was his home, long before he broke into TV and movies, Williams was never a particularly offensive comedian. Like most performers who became big names in the 1970s and 1980s, some of his skits haven’t aged too well through a modern lens, but he was a product of his time.
The endlessly energetic funnyman was famed for his razor-sharp wit, ability to improvise at will, and off-the-cuff asides that took aim at anyone and anything that tickled his fancy, but he wasn’t causing shocked gasps or gaining complaints for going too far like many of his contemporaries.
However, he knows he crossed the line when he pissed off an entire country. He sparked the ire of a nation by taking a shot at the Olympics, of all things, riffing that Rio de Janeiro had beaten Chicago for the right to host the 2016 edition of the games because the local delegation went one better than ‘Windy City’ favourites Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama by supplying the organisers with “50 strippers and one pound of cocaine.”
Williams didn’t pay much heed to the Brazilian backlash for the next two years, which is understandable when comics only tend to address a contentious joke if it causes widespread or massive outrage, but things inevitably changed when he touched down in the country. Speaking to a local newspaper, the Academy Award-winning icon sought to clear the air and issued the most public apology of his career.
“Damn, I offended everybody!” he acknowledged. “I’m sorry! That’s what happens in comedy. When you cross that line, some people will laugh and some people will get offended.”
Even though he said sorry, it’s not much of an apology. It is, technically, but he also made an entirely accurate point that almost every comedian will sympathise with: lines are there to be crossed, and when that happens, it isn’t going to amuse everyone.
In the initial aftermath of his ill-timed joke, reports suggested that the legal team representing the Rio Olympics was considering suing Williams for bringing the city, its reputation, and its bidding process into disrepute, while the local mayor, Eduardo Paes, brushed it off by saying the Chicago-born actor was simply jealous that his hometown had lost out on the games.
Comedians have been poking fun at various cities since it was first discovered that people would pay money to have their ribs tickled, but Williams underestimated how passionate Brazilians can be. It might have taken him two years to get around to it, but he did eventually hold his hands up, confess to his comedic sins, and seek forgiveness for suggesting cocaine and strippers were the driving force behind Chicago failing to secure the Olympics.
