Day: August 15, 2014

We saw him perform live once in Cleveland, Happy Wife and I. My gut hurt so hard from laughing you’d have thought I just did a hundred situps. I don’t disagree one bit with the consensus review: Robin Williams was a lightening storm of comedic talent. Sui generis. Without equal. Nonpareil. Ne plus ultra. All that.

Thing is, I’ve no idea what goes awry in a man’s wetware to cause him to descend into an inescapable well of darkness like that. If there’s one thing I think we can say for sure, the brain’s Prime Directive is the survival of its host, at all costs, no matter what, come what may, living is always better than the alternative. If anything is “hard wired” it’s the Prime Directive. The kind of dysfunction that can override that has to be some seriously scary sh*t.

So let me add my voice to the throng: Thank you for the laughter, Robin. A WHOLE LOT OF LAUGHTER. So far as I know we’re the only creatures capable of it. Life is incomplete without it. And in that way, you helped us all be human.

Godspeed, man. Godspeed.