Robin Williams’ Humor at a Human Pace

Time was--before the kids’ movies, before the Oscar nominations--that you needed to snort down about three shots of espresso to keep up with Robin Williams on a stand-up comedy tear. These days, with Williams on his first multi-city comedy tour in more than 15 years, a cup of coffee would probably do the trick.

Williams is still quick with a one-line aside, but Wednesday night at the Universal Amphitheatre, in the first of a two-night stand, he was moving at a more human pace.

Dressed in casual black in front of a ridiculous palm-frond display on the stage, Williams opened--as he has elsewhere on this 26-city tour--with local and topical humor. He wondered, for instance, how Washington, D.C., would handle a Mike Tyson boxing bout, now that the district has given him a license. “Washington, D.C., has been used to back-biting--but not literally.” Then, in his announcer voice: “Let’s get ready to nibble!”

He dug into some political material as well, riffing on Congress and boy king George II, “a compassionate conservative. That’s like a Volvo with a gun rack.”

Although the president, airplane hijacking and bombing Afghanistan all were targets, Williams never aimed beyond the acceptable. At his darkest, he still has a night light on.

While his bottomless bag of accents provides the easy laughs--such as the drunk Scotsman who speaks only in vowels--his physical humor is often better. A so-so bit on airport security was revived when he acted out how his heavily pierced friends go through a metal detector. A historian’s recent assertion that Adolf Hitler might’ve been gay yielded a hilarious and unexpected goose-step-as-musical-theater number.

Williams’ act is still muscular but also tense. A brief moment when he lost track of a punch line reminded the audience what a high-wire act stand-up still is for anyone, even Williams. (Maybe especially Williams, the Oscar-winning movie star.) He isn’t yet at ease with the quiet moments in his routine; moments that could be relaxing breathing room are a bit panic-filled. It might be that the audience expected the rat-a-tat stream-of-consciousness humor he did in the 1980s, but it felt more as if this one-time sprinter is struggling some with the pacing of a longer race.

But when it all worked, he had the audience with him at every joke, every gesture. His routine about how Koko, the gorilla who knows sign language, would play the dating game flowed easily. There was a similar comfort to his bits on the uncomfortable aspects of growing older--when a colonoscopy camera becomes “your own Discovery Channel special.”

Now 50, Williams has been talking about coming back to stand-up for at least three years, and this tour seems part of a larger effort to reinflate his persona. He has some films in the can that are the antithesis of the Robin-Williams-as-savior movies (“Good Will Hunting,” “Patch Adams”). “Death to Smoochy,” directed by Danny DeVito, has him plotting revenge against his replacement on a kids’ TV show. In “One Hour Photo,” he’s an unstable photo processor obsessed with a local family, and in “Insomnia,” he’s a murderer playing cat-and-mouse with the FBI.

Still, there’s something about the big-hearted movie characters that Williams is known for that allows him to caricature gay men, blacks, Asians, even the developmentally delayed, and never be suspected of being mean-spirited. And there’s something about an evening of smart, if not biting, comedy, that made a largely adoring audience forget “Bicentennial Man.”