The actor who couldn’t stand Robin Williams: “I’ll rip his leg off and shove it up his ass”
Ask a group of people which actor they love most on a parasocial level, and you’re likely to hear the name “Robin Williams” fairly frequently. The comedian was larger-than-life, possessing an unparalleled ability to take a question, a line, or a comment and run and run and run with it.
He also had the seemingly contradictory ability to imbue every character with heart. Whether he was playing a father who dresses in drag to spend more time with his kids or an English teacher who instils a love of poetry and free thinking in his young students, he could convey warmth and humanity like few other actors before or since.
Luckily for the millions of filmgoers who projected their adoration onto Williams, his collaborators were able to vouch for the comedian’s virtues in real life. His friend and Awakenings co-star Robert De Niro praised his kindness and heart, saying, “No one could fake that kind of love and compassion.” Julia Roberts said that his support and good spirits were the only reason she was able to make it through the hellish production of Hook. And Jeff Bridges said that even though he expected Williams to be a liability when they started production on Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, he was completely won over by him and came to respect him as a serious actor.
There was, however, one person who professed to hate Williams with a passion. David Brenner, who was a comedian in the 1970s and ’80s and was known for his observational comedy routines on late-night television, accused his fellow stand-up of stealing his material sometime in the ’70s. In Richard Zoglin’s 2008 book Comedy on the Edge, which focuses on the explosion of stand-up during the period, Brenner talked about calling up Williams’ agent and threatening bodily harm if the young comedian didn’t stop poaching his work.
“Tell Robin if he ever takes one more line from me, I’ll rip his leg off and shove it up his ass!” he remembered saying.
Brenner was not the first or the last comedian to accuse Williams of plagiarism, but many others defended him, saying that it was impossible to avoid inadvertently recycling jokes, especially as a comedian whose entire process revolved around observation.
Williams was always upfront about his tendency to absorb other material but was also quick to defend himself against unfounded accusations. Speaking to Rolling Stone just before the film Awakenings was released in 1990, the actor said that he wasn’t going to claim to have never used other people’s material.
“If you watch comedy eight hours a day, something will register, and it’ll come out. And if it happened, I said, ‘I apologize. I’ll pay you for this,'” he said. But he also acknowledged that even when he told a joke that was based on something in his own life, people would accuse him of stealing. Eventually, he said, he stopped going to comedy clubs altogether, waiting outside until it was his turn to perform in order to avoid being accused of thievery.
Regardless of whether Williams ever “stole” material, most of his fans would testify that his appeal wasn’t ever about the punchlines or even the set-ups. It was the delivery that earned him legendary status and made him a household name far outside the insular world of stand-up. He reeled off jokes with machine-gun speed and with a relentless energy that no one could match, let alone exceed. He may have regurgitated a line here or there, but his stage presence was unparalleled.
