My parents took me to see Dead Poets Society in theaters when I was four or five.  The story, as I remember it, is that we were stuck in the middle of the theater when they realized Neil was about to commit suicide, and they couldn’t get us out before it happened without pissing off the rest of the audience.  I was pretty shaken by the experience, to hear them tell it.  I don’t remember the story from inside my own head.  It’s a tale that’s been told to me, and I might be telling it wrong today.

I didn’t have much television in my life growing up.  I’d say “any,” but we did watch the Olympics, and the news on election nights, and somehow I saw a few episodes of Duck Tales and Ninja Turtles (I think we got VHS tapes via a Pizza Hut reading challenge maybe?).  My main exposure to TV was when we’d travel south to visit our family in Tennessee.  My grandparents had cable, and I stayed up in their den downstairs until three or four o’clock in the morning, when the old George Reeve Superman serial aired.  To reach Superman, though, I had to watch six or seven hours of old-school TV.  Those evenings are a mash of Mary Tyler Moore and the Dick Van Dyke show and I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched in my memory, all of which shows were great—but the very occasional episodes of Mork and Mindy had a different flavor.  Even that young I could see something weird and sincere and strange was happening on screen.

My sister and I were big Disney kids.  Because we weren’t allowed to watch videos or TV but loved the musicals so much, we made (with Mom and Dad’s help!) audio tape recordings of the soundtracks, so we could color or read or build legos or whatever and sing along.  Aladdin was a special favorite—”How about I call you Al?  Or maybe just Din?  How about Laddie?”  We weren’t always the best at common cause, my sister and I (sorry, Hal), but we came together on those recordings.  (We’d do the same later, older, with the BBC Radio Lord of the Rings adaptations.)

My father-in-law worked for Disney while Aladdin was being made, and apparently when Robin Williams came in to audition for the Genie, the script had the Genie pop out of the lamp, say a sentence or two, and jump straight into “Never Had a Friend Like Me.”  The whole post-lamp monologue, the Ed Sullivan joke, the Scottish bit, “Do I look different to you,” “He Can be Taught!” all that stuff, Williams ad-libbed based on the few lines he was given.  He got the part, of course.  They let him ad lib off the script for the whole movie, and the animators matched their drawings to his performance.

And then there was Good Will Hunting.  Boston has, as of my writing this, made the bench—you know the bench I mean—into a shrine.  There’s a reason for that.  To be honest, that movie probably let me project myself a little too much into the main character—but that turned out okay, because it was also a movie about how being smart (or thinking you are) might get you noticed, but isn’t enough to make a you a man.

I didn’t know Robin Williams as a standup performer—until college, that is, when it seemed everyone I knew loved his Live on Broadway special.  Normally people telling me something’s funny is the kiss of death: I don’t know why, I just don’t like being told I’m going to laugh.  I sat down to watch the special thinking, eh, well, at least it’s only—

OH MY GOD.

I’ve laughed that hard three times in my life.  Each time I thought I was gonna die, because no way any oxygen was reaching my brain.  I’m talking about laughing so hard you can’t do any crunches the next day.  The golf bit.  The golf bit!  “Fuck croquet!  I’m gonna take the hole and put it hundreds of yards away!”

Six years later I was teaching in southern China, and I was alone in the way you’re only ever alone if you’re in a foreign country with only one other person for hundreds of miles around who speaks your native language natively.   (We had local friends, but there’s a difference.)  It was a tired, hot late spring day, and my teaching partner and I found a  copy of Good Morning Vietnam at Honest Bob’s Totally Legitimate DVD Shop on the corner.  Neither of us had seen it.  Sure as hell felt like that movie had seen us.

A few years later, after I moved to Cambridge, my friend Rachel pushed our group to watch Williams’ Inside the Actors Studio episode.  James Lipman struggles for something like half an hour to get a single question in edgewise.  The rest is Robin Williams and the audience.

And that’s not touching Mrs. Doubtfire, and Jumanji, and Patch Adams, and oh jesus how could I forget Hook which I bought the comic of so I could enjoy it again in those days when we didn’t go see things more than once in the movie theater, and.  Well.

A friend today told me that it seemed, for kids our age, like he would always be here.  That’s true.  His death is like your favorite uncle’s death—even less possible than your father’s, in a way, because if your eyes are open you know your parents are mortal before you leave their house.  The family you see seldom, though—they seem like they’ll be strong forever.

But I think there’s another reason Robin Williams seemed like he’d always be here.  He tapped into something that has always been here and will endure as long as we’re a species that deserves, in its better moments, to call itself human.  Naming this “something” is hard, but naming’s my job, so I’ll try: he was—is—hilarious, and at the same time possessed of a dignity so profound he never needed to assert it.  Blake sings songs of innocence and experience, but he aims higher—toward a second, greater innocence that has endured and transcended experience.  Higher innocence is the realm of the sacred fool, and for me Williams’ characters, by and large, are fools in that sacred mold.  He doesn’t laugh like someone ignorant of the world.  He doesn’t laugh like someone who knows the world’s shit, either.  He laughs, and gets us to laugh, because even though we have ample evidence the world’s a shitty place, the big joke is that it’s also charged with the grandeur of God.

I’ll miss him, and savor what endures.

—

I wish I could just leave this post here, but I need to do some housecleaning.  As of your receipt of this message, I’m on a plane for London, there to attend the World Science Fiction Convention, see wonderful people, and just incidentally see what happens with the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award that I’m nominated for this year eek.  Um.  Ignore that last bit.  Anyway!  If you happen to be at WorldCon, I’ll be on a number of panels.  Here’s my schedule on the WorldCon website, and I’ve updated the events page too.  I have a blog post for next week queued up, so you won’t experience any loss of coverage, but I won’t be around to chat, so please stay civil in my absence.