I have this principle: try not to feel too sad about the death of someone famous. First, there’s the fame that most of us can only dream about. Then there’s the money – again, the stuff of dreams. Third, and most important, they never really die. They just move to a different zip code, taking up permanent residence on your TV screen (or your iPod, in the case of a singer). Unless you knew them personally, or unless they were struck down in their prime, leaving behind a host of what-ifs and if-onlys, famous people, when they die, don’t need our sadness. They deserve our smiles, our gratitude, and, if you believe in that sort of thing, our wishes for a happy afterlife, being tailed by paparazzi as they go skinny dipping in Elysian pools with Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor.
But the death of Robin Williams is a sad business because it reminds us of how hard it is to be a comedian. One, it’s really hard – you know that saying about how dying is easy, comedy not so much. You’re either born with the talent to make people laugh or you aren’t. And then, you don’t get the kind of respect “serious” actors do, the kind of God-is-dead notices we got when Philip Seymour Hoffman passed away earlier this year. This can be depressing, knowing that you’re making the world laugh, and knowing that they’re loving you for it, and yet, when Oscar time arrives, they’re going to pick Gandhi over Tootsie , and if you want an Oscar – and everyone in Hollywood wants an Oscar – you have to grow a beard and hunker down on a park bench and tell a cocky genius that he may have read up on everything but he really knows nothing, not what it’s like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy or hold a best friend as he gasps his last breaths.
The sadness about the death of a comedian comes from the realisation that even a talent like Jim Carrey, who spent the early part of his career following his magnificently unfettered id, suddenly felt compelled to explore his “serious” side in films like Man on the Moon , The Majestic and The Truman Show . And still, he never got the kind of attention for these efforts as did “serious” actors who opted for a change of pace with comedic roles. It’s a no-win situation, really. You understand why someone like Woody Allen moved from Bananas and Love and Death (“Boris is trying to commit suicide. Last week, he contemplated inhaling next to an Armenian.”) to tortured, Bergmanesque relationship dramas like Interiors and September .
Allen, perhaps, embodied this dichotomy best, this push-pull impulse between doing what comes naturally and what people love and doing what’s going to get you the respect and admiration of your peers. The film, of course, is Stardust Memories , which gets going when a filmmaker attends a retrospective of his films and runs into a fan who professes to love his movies, “especially [the] early, funny ones.” Maybe the news of Robin Williams’ death is a wake-up call for us (and the Oscar committee) to respect comedy and comedians more. It seems odd that we prefer to honour the actors who keep reminding us about how miserable life is instead of those who do their darnedest to make us forget, at least for a while, about the horrors that surround us.
At one point in Stardust Memories , the filmmaker runs into super-intelligent alien beings and asks them “meaning of life”-type questions. “But shouldn’t I stop making movies and do something that counts, like... like helping blind people or becoming a missionary or something?” An alien replies, “Let me tell you, you’re not the missionary type. You’d never last. And incidentally, you’re also not Superman; you’re a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.” For a while, Robin Williams did us that service. He told the funniest jokes.
