The Robin Williams Show

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."

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.

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