Robin Williams’ unethical approach to stand-up comedy: “The worst thing you can do”
The business of entertainment can be a brutal place – your friends can quickly become enemies, people you trusted will screw you over and the more successful you become, the more you scramble to try and preserve it. Fame is a fickle thing, with many people in Hollywood developing strange relationships with the idea of being perceived and forming a dependency on being seen.
It could be the kinds of celebrities who call the paparazzi when leaving the house to be photographed in a nice outfit or the ones who funnel their personality through every branch of social media possible, trying to keep one foot in the door and stay relevant through every minute of the day.
However, this can obviously become a slightly toxic reliance, with some performers suffering as a result of their ingrained need to entertain audiences and constantly be a people pleaser, whether it be Matthew Perry and his struggles while filming Friends or Charli XCX and her open discussions around the success of Brat. But this was something that Robin Williams allegedly experienced in his own way whilst at the height of his career, with the actor being accused of buying jokes from other comedians while searching for material.
Williams has always been regarded as one of the most effortless entertainers of all time, with a natural sense of comedic timing and ability to pluck infectious one-liners and jokes seemingly from nowhere. From his performance in Aladdin as the genie, in which his dialogue was hugely different from the lines written on the page because of his constant improvisations, to the physical comedy of his role as Mrs Doubtfire, the actor has never come across as someone who struggled to find a joke, with Williams being able to find the fun in any moment.
However, there are some who have a polar opposite opinion of the actor, with some comedians later sharing how Williams had sometimes paid to steal jokes from them and pass it off as his own. Voiceover actor Joey Camen once said, “I stayed away from the guy. He used to steal material. He stole my material. He stole one of my bits and did it on the Mork & Mindy pilot. And I got really pissed. And he gave me a cheque for $300 and told me, ‘Don’t cash it til Tuesday’. I was really fucking angry at the guy. He stole from a lot of people, but the thing was, he only stole from people that he could get it away from. You didn’t see him stealing from George Carlin”.
Given that original ideas are now such a hot commodity, it is unsurprising that Camen was so frustrated by this alleged trick of Williams, with fame being used as a tool to steal from people who most likely didn’t have the same opportunities as he did to showcase their work, even if it was just as good.
Camen expanded on this by saying, “[It was] people no one knew, or people who needed money. Some people could pay their rent just from him stealing a joke. But the whole thing is, he’d steal your joke, do it on The Tonight Show, and you’d do your joke, and people thought you stole from Robin Williams. The worst thing you can do to a comedian is steal their material.”
While he might be one of the greats, it would seem that some people within the business of comedy don’t respect Williams or see him as someone who is worth their salt, especially if he regularly committed the ultimate cardinal sin of entertainment.
