Mork has left the planet

walrus

Reverential Member
Gold Supporting
Joined
Dec 23, 2006
Messages
23,956
Reaction score
8,019
Location
Massachusetts
What a sad day... For all his "crazy/manic" comedy, I was always impressed by some of his films - I particularly enjoyed Good Morning Vietnam and Mrs. Doubtfire. A great loss.

walrus
 

jcwu

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 22, 2008
Messages
2,958
Reaction score
37
Location
San Jose, CA
I always thought Robin and Bono were twins separated at birth.

RIP, Mr. Williams. You gave us many good laughs.
 

adorshki

Reverential Member
Joined
Aug 21, 2009
Messages
34,176
Reaction score
6,790
Location
Sillycon Valley CA
Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters had a singular ability to crack up Johnny Carson.
I was always afraid that if both spent too much time in the same room, some weird form of a runaway comedic fusion reaction would cause the world to end in a rapidly expanding cloud of hysterically-laughing-until-they're-crying ions.
It sounds like you're unaware or maybe forgot that Winters was actually a regular in the last season of Mork & Mindy, played their kid.
Not knowing how they met, I gotta wonder if Winters was one of Williams' heroes. Would make a whole lotta sense to me.
Like maybe from seeing him in "Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" ?
 

walrus

Reverential Member
Gold Supporting
Joined
Dec 23, 2006
Messages
23,956
Reaction score
8,019
Location
Massachusetts

bluesypicky

Enlightened Member
Joined
Sep 8, 2009
Messages
7,763
Reaction score
394
Location
Jupiter, FL.
I caught the news yesterday afternoon as it just popped up on the Yahoo homepage... what an eerie feeling.
I can feel the void his way-too-early departure has already created, which says much about how big he really was.
Sadly missed.
Depression is a bit@#.
 

killdeer43

Reverential Member
Joined
Aug 21, 2008
Messages
21,848
Reaction score
111
Location
Northwest Washington on the Salish Sea
Oh Captain, my Captain...
To that allow me to add....

carpedieml.jpg


A clear message, if ever there was one!

Joe
 

adorshki

Reverential Member
Joined
Aug 21, 2009
Messages
34,176
Reaction score
6,790
Location
Sillycon Valley CA
Sadly missed.
Depression is a bit@#.
I know we've talked about "Clinical Depression" before, but Bipolar's a whole different order of magnitude. My brother's got it.
Even when he maintains his meds he battles moods of anhedonia and amotivation.
So you give up the thrill of the mania, "for what?"
Avoiding catatonia? And I mean that literally. My brother's first episode was topped by a week-long catatonic state. He was only 13 years old.
I think I understand what Robin and Johnathan must have been struggling with now.
I don't recall ever hearing they were actually struggling with what they used to call "manic depression".
The substance abuse always gets all the blame, but that's just an attempt to self-medicate, to answer Johnw63's question about which comes first.
In my brother's case, he didn't have a problem maintaining sobriety, he just had a problem with feeling about as motivated as a limp rag all the time and stopped his meds a couple of times when he thought he could stay "normal".
For an artist that's probably a curse on top of a curse, the lack of motivation thing.
 

davismanLV

Venerated Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2011
Messages
19,197
Reaction score
11,813
Location
U.S.A. : Nevada : Las Vegas
Guild Total
2
That's the trouble with manic depressive disorder. Keeping people on the meds. They level you out so you don't feel the lows.... and unfortunately you don't feel the highs either. Actually, you don't feel anything. It's a really crappy way to live. So they go off the meds and then it all starts again. Any type of mental illness is usually exacerbated by alcohol and recreational drug use. Like Al said, it's trying to self-medicate..... to make the bad $hit go away. What a sad thing.

I think James Taylor summed it up nicely in his statement: "I felt two things immediately when I got the news last night:first that the light had dimmed and, on its heels, a sense that this was inevitable; that Robin had lived for a long time with a darkness at the periphery of his vision.


What must it have been like to be present when he improvised the genie in "Aladdin" or Lovelace in "Happy Feet?" His Texan, his gay stylist, his Soviet comedian, Mrs. Doubtfire…He was a one-man menagerie.


Perhaps, just as we were swept away, so was he.


I remember the small, uncontrollable chuckle that often accompanied his flights of fancy; as if he were as amazed as we were by what was happening to him.


Who can pretend to understand a gift like Robin Williams's? Meteoric, volcanic, fast and furious…Perhaps there is a price for such brilliance.


I'm so sad he's gone and so grateful he left us so much." ~ James Taylor

Amen, James..... Amen.
 

twocorgis

Venerated Member
Gold Supporting
Joined
Jan 8, 2010
Messages
13,922
Reaction score
6,519
Location
Lawn Guyland
Guild Total
18
I saw James' post too Tom, and thought it was the best tribute to Robin of all that I've read. It's really ironic that the funniest comedians that I've know all live on the edge of darkness.
 

jcwu

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 22, 2008
Messages
2,958
Reaction score
37
Location
San Jose, CA
It's really ironic that the funniest comedians that I've know all live on the edge of darkness.

I have felt for a long time that comedy is often a mask for sadness, which is why those who suffer most are often the funniest - they need to be to survive.
 

bluesypicky

Enlightened Member
Joined
Sep 8, 2009
Messages
7,763
Reaction score
394
Location
Jupiter, FL.
That's the trouble with manic depressive disorder. Keeping people on the meds. They level you out so you don't feel the lows.... and unfortunately you don't feel the highs either. Actually, you don't feel anything. It's a really crappy way to live. So they go off the meds and then it all starts again. Any type of mental illness is usually exacerbated by alcohol and recreational drug use. Like Al said, it's trying to self-medicate..... to make the bad $hit go away. What a sad thing.

Mental illness is the big unknown still today, in the medical world. And the way it is approached and managed is even worst than the lack of understanding over it.

Of course psychiatrists won't admit it, as they're making a living numbing the depressed, bi-polar, and schizophrenic with tricyclic antidepressants, monoamine oxidase inhibitors and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are all providing zero help towards curing these conditions, other than inducing a zombie like state and shutting off your appetite in most cases.

We've come a long way as far as isolating the different areas of the brain and their correlations with the central nervous system, but we still don't know much, if anything about the chemical reactions within.

Consequently, the management of these patients is very ill advised and misguided, and often shameful when looking at some of these "institutions" out there....
The complex nature / mechanisms of these mental illnesses and the fact that almost nothing is understood of them, contributes to casting a dark stigma about them, and this negative bias doesn't help in approaching them openly.
It is also why so many just choose to ignore their existence, or even worse, laugh about it.

I'm not laughing. Maybe because I've been hit by one of these "depressions" that stayed with me for the better part of four years.
Glad I was able to shake it off and regain an interest in living, Robin (and so many others including a cousin of mine, diagnosed with schizophrenia, who killed herself at age 53) wasn't that lucky.
 
Last edited:

Westerly Wood

Venerated Member
Joined
Mar 21, 2007
Messages
13,323
Reaction score
6,497
Guild Total
2
One of my favorite roles was the failed psychiatrist now store clerk in Dead Again. Or what about One Hour Photo. Creepy role. He could have played anyone. Ultimate was good will hunting. What a perfect performance.
 
Top