Published on May 31, 1998
I grew up watching Robin Williams go nuts for 30 minutes a week
on television, and spent a good portion of my teenage/early adult
years laughing at his comedy routines he performed onstage. I
remember my dad taking me to see
Popeye, and us all watching
The World According To Garp on cable. No one cheered louder
than me (well, at least in my household) when Williams won his
first Academy Award earlier this year, an award I thought he should
have won for
Good Morning, Vietnam.
But I also remembered that Williams had released three comedy
albums based on his stage routines. (Actually, I had forgotten
about the second album,
Throbbing Python Of Love, until I started writing this
review.) The first of these albums,
Reality… What A Concept, captures an early edition of
Williams’s manic stage act and improvizational skills.
Unfortunately, a hacked job of editing ruins the sequence of this
album, and the comedy routines suffer.
Williams very much is a comedian who relies on his physical
appearances – he can say more with one funny face than some comics
could in an hour’s routine. The problem is that this doesn’t
translate onto vinyl, meaning characters like the toddler in
“Kindergarten For The Stars” and “Reverend Ernest Angry” lose a
little bit in the translation.
Oh, there are some hilarious moments on
Reality… What A Concept, such as Williams contemplating
what chairs think about all day and Mr. Rogers sending a hamster
into nuclear meltdown in the microwave. Even though this album is
almost 20 years old (and having worn out a taped copy I made from
the library when I was a kid before adding it permanently to the
Pierce Archives), it has lost very little of the punch. Even the
jokes about then-president Jimmy Carter and references to the Three
Mile Island disaster still evoke laughs from me.
The problem with this disc is in the editing. You can easily
tell where snips in the tape were made – the sound is incredibly
uneven within even one particular sketch. (C’mon, how do you
explain Williams’s improv Shakespeare jumping from Studio 54 to
Three Mile Island?) Sketches, thus, are created using material that
never was supposed to be related. Some sketches, like “Kindergarten
For The Stars,” sounds like it ends way too soon, while “A Touch Of
Fairfax”‘s only understandable reference is to drugs, and isn’t
that funny.
The final result of this album makes it sound like it was pieced
together at random – and that, kids, isn’t funny. Williams’s style
of comedy has always been “shoot from the hip,” going in whatever
direction his mind chooses at the moment. As a result, whatever he
was working on at that time has its own unique flavor – and mixing
such flavors rarely works well.
If you really want to get a good taste of Williams’s stage
routine, turn off your stereo, hie yourself out to the local video
shack, and rent both of Williams’s performance tapes. Then, put
them in, laugh your ass off, watch them again, and repeat as
neccessary.
Reality… What A Concept is no longer available, except at
some used record stores (and you may have to search for this
title). But the sad reality is, this concept isn’t worth searching
out unless you are a diehard Williams fan.