A lanky, sandy-haired kid in baggy pants and suspenders wanders around the set. Spotting a stack of bologna sandwiches, he grabs one, tries to feed it to a nearby coleus and expresses his fond hope that the food will help the plant "grow up strong and have hairy pistils like its father." Next he picks up a small statue and, holding it like a microphone, intones, "Allo, allo, zis eez Jacques Cousteau for Union Oil." He then breaks into the Beverly Hills Blues: "Woke up the other day/ Ran out of Perrier/ I've really paid my dues/ Had to sell my Gucci shoes." The Robin Williams show has begun. Except that the show takes place off-camera between takes on Mark & Mindy —the sleeper comedy sitcom of the young TV season.
Like Cindy Williams and Penny Marshall before him, Robin Williams, 26, did one guest spot on Happy Days and wound up on a spin-off series of his own. As the affable Mork from the planet Ork, Williams has limitless opportunities to display his manic talent. Unaccustomed to the ways of Earth, the alien sits on his head, drinks with his fingers and holds philosophical discussions with eggs.
Placing someone with paranormal powers among ordinary people is a classic conceit used by many television shows, including Bewitched, My Favorite Martian and I Dream of Jeannie. But Williams' pastiche of mime, light-speed improvisation and complex clowning is giving that one-joke vehicle a new velocity. Delivered with his engagingly boyish grin and calculated inflections, such gibberish as "nano, nano" (meaning hello) and "nimnul" (meaning jerk) can send audiences—and producers—into paroxysms of delight: last week the show shot up to seventh place in the Nielsens. "This guy is going to be a superstar with or without this series," observes Dale McCraven, the co-creator of Mork & Mindy. "He's such an overwhelming personality that he could never play a regular sitcom husband with a wife and kids. It would be a waste of his talent, a waste of his craziness."
That craziness is the best part of Williams' frequent weekend gigs at such Los Angeles clubs as the Comedy Store and the Improvisation. His act has few props, no sight gags, no patented one-liners; for Williams, the delivery is everything.
Equipped with a kaleidoscopic face, a pliant body and Umber vocal cords, Williams simply runs through a cast of character sketches unseen since the early days of Jonathan Winters. "Earthquake!" he will yell, jumping up and down, before he rushes out to the audience to heckle himself. Within seconds, he is back onstage, giving a beautiful basso profundo rendition of Shakespeare, followed by rapid-fire impressions of a go-go boy, Long John Silver and characters from a Japanese science-fiction movie. "It's madness all around," he explains. "But the center is very calm, like the center of a hurricane."