A photo of the late actor Robin Williams playing Mork from Ork hangs with flowers and notes left by people paying their respects, at a makeshift memorial in Boulder, Colo., Tuesday Aug. 12, 2014, outside the home where the 80s TV series Mork & Mindy, starring Williams, was set. Williams, the Academy Award winner and comic supernova whose explosions of pop culture riffs and impressions dazzled audiences for decades and made him a gleamy-eyed laureate for the Information Age, died Monday, Aug. 11, in an apparent suicide. He was 63.View our Into the Darkness series on suicide.
Like everyone else, I was saddened to read on Monday that Robin Williams had apparently committed suicide. For me, he was a bit like watching a train wreck, or staring at “The Kramer” painting from “Seinfeld”: I couldn’t look away. Occasionally, he was more annoying than funny, but mostly he was very funny.
Like his hero Jonathan Winters, you never knew where his brain was going to go or what would come out of his mouth, and he was that way from the beginning.
Most people first remember him from “Mork & Mindy,” but I first saw him a year earlier as a regular performer on the new “Laugh-In” in 1977. The show was entirely forgettable, and short-lived, but he was not.
The main thing I remember about the show is that Williams stood out – and that he interrupted a Frank Sinatra bit, which was gutsy to begin with, shook Sinatra’s hand and said, “I’m so happy I could drop a log.”