CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN ,YOU DID SEIZE THE DAY…Bikram Vohra pays tribute to Robin Williams
I guess he gave so many people so many laughs he ran out of laughs for himself. People who make people laugh are usually isolated people and the goblins in their mind come from a whole other tribe. Robin Williams kept his goblins at bay by being the lightning rod.
Humorists do that, they allow themselves to be controversial and pull in the slack. That’s why clowns are sad. They see beyond the pale, a bit too deeply and what they see disturbs them so much because they cannot share it and it introverts and gnaws from within.
Humour is a stringently distilled activity and those who opt to chase it live in constant fear of being found out. What if someone does not laugh with joy seeing as how taking offence, being insulted, finding it unfunny or mocking the action are just a thin line away and often cross the border.
Only a handful of people who deal in comedy and the tragedy that follows it constantly will understand that Robin Williams couldn’t handle the funny mirrors that don’t distort life but actually clarify the vision. What most of the world sees as straight is the distortion. Those with a sense of humour that is their foundation for a profession and over developed see life as it is as a distortion and then use their imagination to make it straight… and that is where the laughs come from. And the insight that is often too heavy to bear.
It is scary. Whenever I write a funny piece I get moody and sulky sand wait in trepidation for it to appear in public and am sure I will be castaway in a canoe on a stormy sea of criticism. It is a fear whose texture is impossible to explain.
You can never explain it to anyone. That scary sensation of being all alone with your funny haha funny peculiar take on a facet of life. Only other humorists condemned and blessed by this gift will have a sliver of understanding why he left the stage before his cue… chased by his own bear.
Robin Williams probably just wanted to go where he had never been before. He knew it was a one way ticket and had once said that suicide is a permanent solution for temporary problems.
He didn’t commit suicide, he played a joke on himself.