Can The Real Robin Still Stand Up?

By Terry McCarthy/CHICAGO

Robin Williams is nervous. He is prowling around backstage at the Chicago Theater, waiting for the curtain to go up in front of a packed house and wondering if he can make the 3,800 people out there laugh. It's the opening show in his first stand-up tour in almost 16 years. He turned 50, "an age when you realize your prostate is bigger than your ego," last July. Can he still carry an audience for nearly two hours on his own, the way he last did in New York City when he was just 35?

Even now--especially now, minutes before show time--he is looking for fresh material. A friend of the promoter's comes backstage wearing a shaggy black coat, and immediately Williams is all over her, making barking noises, "look, she is wearing a poodle," then becoming a haughty French grande dame giving fashion commentary. The woman is taken aback and then starts laughing. The stagehands are laughing. Williams is loosening up the only way he knows how: by cracking other people up.

Onstage he's as manic as ever, sweating by the pint as his body bounds around, trying to keep up with the rapid-fire humor synapses of his brain. His jokes run from nonsensical (wet-burka competitions and "Enron Hubbard, head of the Church of Profitology") to predictable ("We used to pay for powder in little white envelopes"). Comedians who play closer to the edge, like Chris Rock or Andy Dick, make his style seem quaint. But Robin Williams' improv is still an amazing high-wire act. "It's a risk if it doesn't work," he told TIME last month. "But it's a gas. You go out and kick it, and every night you pick up new stuff."

At a half-century, Williams is looking for a lot of new stuff. "When you get to be older, you start to think, What will be your body of work? What will you leave behind?" he says. And his oeuvre is, frankly, spotty. No one can take away Mork & Mindy; Good Morning, Vietnam; or his Oscar for Good Will Hunting. But Williams is a recovering schmaltzaholic, having engaged in a dangerous number of Patch Adams- and Mrs. Doubtfire-type roles. As therapy, apart from performing before 39 live audiences in 26 cities over the next two months, he's beating a woman to death in rural Alaska (in Insomnia, with Al Pacino), plotting the downfall of a TV rival (in Death to Smoochy) and stalking an adulterer, with a carving knife in his backpack (in One Hour Photo). "Those warm, open characters, outsiders who want to help other people--is that part of me? Oh, yeah," says Williams. "But people want to label you as one thing. The idea is to break the label when you do something like One Hour Photo, open the f-stop a little."

In that movie, which drew critical praise at the Sundance Film Festival and will be released in the fall, Williams plays a lonely photo-shop employee who becomes obsessed with a family whose pictures he has developed for years. Filmed in the neon-lit canyons of a supermarket in the manner of a horror movie, it introduces us to a blank-faced and distinctly unfunny Williams. It's a tiny independent film, but the star had to do some persuading to get the part. "I had said I wanted to do something darker," he says. "I met with the director [Mark Romanek], and I think he thought it was some kind of joke."

Insomnia, due out in May, is even darker. In it Williams plays a stalker who murders a young woman and taunts the detective who flies out to Alaska to find him. "It's two opposite extremes: Pacino playing a cop who can't sleep and me playing this devil's advocate with him." Williams prepared for the role by watching tapes of an interview with Jeffrey Dahmer--"to get his conversational tone; it was so calm." Death to Smoochy is a comedy but not a light one. He plays a TV clown who, incensed at being replaced by Smoochy, a big fuchsia rhinoceros, tries to rub out his successor.

Where does a stand-up comic with a newly acquired taste for playing killers go next? He has been talking to Richard Attenborough about doing a film on Mark Twain, his wife Olivia and Twain's progressively angry view of life. "Twain was one of the first to write about the American character, about us, but it became darker and darker. By the end he was so angry at God and at his life. A character like that, you look for those. They have everything."

Williams too has everything, in a sense: a wife, three children, a home in San Francisco, a ranch in Northern California, Picassos and a private jet. The fact that he is again hitting the road at 50, sweating and joking and nursing a shoulder he dislocated in January, says something about his compulsion to hear people laugh at him.

He hears plenty in Chicago. He gets a standing ovation as he walks onstage. When people stop applauding, he thanks them for coming out in Iditarod weather, makes a few cracks about Enron and Arthur Andersen (the latter has its headquarters in Chicago), and the audience is his. He segues into the Olympic luge competition--"invented by a drunken German gynecologist; you steer with Kegels"--and then it is on to anthrax and botox, and then he jumps straight into Sept. 11. He gets cheers for a bit on a flight attendant telling passengers that in the event of a hijacking, a Louisville Slugger will fall from the compartment above--"Apply to the head, groin and knees."

He knows his humor is not as cynically rebellious as some of the younger comics'. (See above joke.) But it is still more spontaneous than most. He has no gagwriters and goes onstage without a scripted routine, an activity that he compares to walking in the wilderness with Ray Charles. In two try-out shows in a casino by Lake Tahoe last month, he changed about half the material from one night to the next. The Chicago show last week was about one-third new material again. This is the most exhausting way to do comedy. Yet unlike those comedians who can barely muster a grin when not onstage, Williams never seems to be down; the performance never ends. His energy levels are prodigious. When he goes cycling, it's for 50 or 60 miles. Lance Armstrong is a cycling partner.

Over midnight sushi in Chicago, he is still popping with energy, happy the first show of the tour went so well. The mix of humor seemed about right; the crowd laughed along with the political jokes as well as the Viagra routines. "The political stuff is the reason to come back out," he says. "I think there is a kind of responsibility [for a comedian] to talk about what everyone is going through. A lot of comedy comes from fear. It's having a take on things that people are maybe thinking but not expressing. That's when you get the huge 'wow' laugh, because you spoke the unspeakable."

The stand-up tour and the three new movies are an attempt to shake off the schmaltz and re-establish Robin Williams, uncut. His particular brand of madness--his ability to take on a multitude of roles--is what keeps him alive, balanced on his high wire. Laughter keeps him up there, prevents him from falling. That is why he cannot stop.