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Williams follows his free-form chatter with enough wacked-out characters to people a spin-off of his spinoff. There is the French waiter at Chez Chuck, moving like a spastic Keystone Kop and offering customers such delicacies as "chicken lips with rice." Mr. Rogers, a takeoff on the dim-but-lovable kiddie show host, says: "Welcome to my neighborhood. Let's put Mr. Hamster in the microwave oven. O.K.? Pop goes the weasel!" Other bit players include Ernest Sincere, a redneck used-car dealer; Joey Stalin, a Russian stand-up comic; Little Sherman, a perverse little boy; and Walt Buzzy, a gay director. Grandpa Funk, based on an old wino Williams once saw in San Francisco, always appears at the end of the show. Clicking his gums and speaking in a raspy high-pitched voice, the old codger explains he used to be a stand-up comedian with a television series about an alien —"of course that was before the real aliens landed." Now he wonders if anyone in the audience remembers World War III —"all 45 minutes of it."
Most of Williams' characters are children of his imagination—an imagination nurtured during the requisite lonely childhood. The last child of a vice president of the Ford Motor Co., Robin was born in Chicago and grew up in the posh Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills. His two half brothers were already grown when he was born, and Robin spent hours alone in the family's immense house, tape-recording television routines of comics and sneaking up to the attic to practice his imitations. "My imagination was my friend, my companion," he recalls.
After brief stints at Claremont Men's College and the College of Marin, he and his companion decided to become performers. Although his indignant father advised him to study welding so he would at least have a marketable skill, Robin won an acting scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York, where he earned money performing mime in whiteface in front of the Metropolitan Museum. In 1976 he returned to San Francisco and met Valerie Velardi, a dancer whom he married last June. Valerie organized and catalogued his routines, and persuaded him to try his act in Los Angeles. With no portfolio, no resume, no connections, Robin headed for open-minded improvisational clubs. Within a year he had landed stints with the now defunct Laugh-In and Richard Pryor shows, which led to his celebrated guest shot on Happy Days.
Today Valerie no longer has to feed Robin information on audience response or coach him on delivery; the prestigious management firm of Rollins and Joffe, which also handles Woody Allen, Robert Klein and Martin Mull, takes care of that. Robin and Valerie live simply in a studio apartment in Los Angeles and a weekend house at Zuma Beach that they share with a parrot named Cora and two iguanas (one of which is named Truman Capote because, as Robin explains, "he's cold-blooded"). Robin's sketches, however, occasionally reflect the ironies of Celluloid City. One, called the "Hollywood Mime," for instance, has a character dancing from door to door in Hollywood, banging on each and smiling hopefully until the smile literally falls off his face and has to be pasted back on. Robin Williams should have no such tribulations: his is stuck tight with Krazy Glue.