page_title: Robin Williams
section_title: Stand-up comedy
hierarchical_section_title: Robin Williams / Career / Stand-up comedy
caption_attribution_description: English: 071220-M-9719V-185 KUBAL, Afghanistan (Dec. 20, 2007) Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix.
context_page_description: Robin McLaurin Williams was an American actor and comedian. He is often regarded by critics as one of the best comedians of all time. He was known for his improvisation skills, and the wide variety of memorable voices he created. He began performing stand-up comedy in San Francisco and Los Angeles during the mid-1970s, and rose to fame for playing the alien Mork in the sitcom Mork & Mindy.
  After his first starring film role in Popeye, Williams starred in several critically and commercially successful films including The World According to Garp, Moscow on the Hudson, Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, Awakenings, The Fisher King, Patch Adams, One Hour Photo, and World's Greatest Dad. He also starred in box office hits such as Hook, Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji, The Birdcage, Good Will Hunting, and the Night at the Museum trilogy. He was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning Best Supporting Actor for Good Will Hunting. He also received two Primetime Emmy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and five Grammy Awards.
  In August 2014, at age 63, Williams committed suicide by hanging at his home in Paradise Cay, California.
context_section_description: Williams began performing stand-up comedy in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1976. He gave his first performance at the Holy City Zoo, a comedy club in San Francisco, where he worked his way up from tending bar. In the 1960s, San Francisco was a center for a rock music renaissance, hippies, drugs, and a sexual revolution, and in the late 1970s, Williams helped lead its "comedy renaissance", writes critic Gerald Nachman. Williams says he found out about "drugs and happiness" during that period, adding that he saw "the best brains of my time turned to mud."
  Williams moved to Los Angeles and continued performing stand-up at clubs including The Comedy Store. There, in 1977, he was seen by TV producer George Schlatter, who asked him to appear on a revival of his show Laugh-In. The show aired in late 1977 and was his debut TV appearance. That year, Williams also performed a show at the L.A. Improv for Home Box Office. While the Laugh-In revival failed, it led Williams into his television career; he continued performing stand-up at comedy clubs such as the Roxy to help keep his improvisational skills sharp. In England, Williams notably performed at The Fighting Cocks.
  With his success on Mork & Mindy, Williams began to reach a wider audience with his stand-up comedy, starting in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, including three HBO comedy specials: Off The Wall (1978), An Evening with Robin Williams (1983), and A Night at the Met (1986). Williams won a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for the recording of his 1979 live show at the Copacabana in New York, Reality ... What a Concept.
  David Letterman, who knew Williams for nearly 40 years, recalls seeing him first perform as a new comedian at The Comedy Store in Hollywood, where Letterman and other comedians had already been doing stand-up. "He came in like a hurricane," said Letterman, who said he then thought to himself, "Holy crap, there goes my chance in show business."
  Williams said that partly due to the stress of performing stand-up, he started using drugs and alcohol early in his career. He further said that he neither drank nor took drugs while on stage, but occasionally performed when hung over from the previous day. During the period he was using cocaine, he said it made him paranoid when performing on stage.
  Williams once described the life of stand-up comedians:
  It's a brutal field, man. They burn out. It takes its toll. Plus, the lifestyle—partying, drinking, drugs. If you're on the road, it's even more brutal. You gotta come back down to mellow your ass out, and then performing takes you back up. They flame out because it comes and goes. Suddenly they're hot, and then somebody else is hot. Sometimes they get very bitter. Sometimes they just give up. Sometimes they have a revival thing and they come back again. Sometimes they snap. The pressure kicks in. You become obsessed and then you lose that focus that you need.
  Some, such as the critic Vincent Canby, were concerned that his monologues were so intense it seemed as though at any minute his "creative process could reverse into a complete meltdown." His biographer, Emily Herbert, described his "intense, utterly manic style of stand-up [which sometimes] defies analysis ... [going] beyond energetic, beyond frenetic ... [and sometimes] dangerous ... because of what it said about the creator's own mental state."
  Williams felt secure that he would not run out of ideas, as the constant change in world events would keep him supplied. He also explained that he often used free association of ideas while improvising in order to keep the audience interested. The competitive atmosphere caused problems; for example, some comedians accused him of stealing their jokes, which Williams strongly denied. David Brenner claims that he confronted Williams' agent and threatened bodily harm if he heard Williams utter another one of his jokes. Whoopi Goldberg defended him, asserting that it is difficult for comedians not to reuse another comedian's material, and that it is done "all the time". He later avoided going to performances 
caption: Williams at a USO show on December 20, 2007
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