Robin Williams

Thomas Brown once noted that death is the cure for all illnesses. This is a morbid way to start a tribute for one of our national treasures, Robin Williams, who died yesterday of an apparent suicide. But let me explain. In "What Dreams May Come," one of his most underrated films, Williams plays a grieving husband whose wife commits suicide. When he, too, later dies, he discovers that she is not in Heaven waiting for him. He is understandably angry, demanding to know why his wife is being punished simply because she ended her suffering. It's a powerful scene, one that could provoke thought and dialogue about suffering and dying.

It appears evident that Williams spent the last several years of his life suffering. He was in and out of rehab, battling drug and alcohol addiction for years. He recently divorced his second wife; his sitcom on CBS, "The Crazy Ones," was canceled after only one season; and the majority of his films in the past decade have been considered flops. Clearly, these were taking a toll. No one deserves suffering, and no one deserves to be blamed for attempting to end their suffering. I feel deeply sorry for Williams and his many family members and for the world, for we have truly lost a decent human being and a comedic genius. I cannot, though, but feel at least an ounce of satisfaction that he will no longer suffer. No one deserves such suffering.

About his acting, where to start? He first got America to adore him through his guest appearances on "Happy Days" as an eccentric alien in the era of sci-fi re-emergence. His character eventually got his own TV show, "Mork and Mindy." There were his dramatic roles, like playing the introverted doctor opposite Robert De Niro in Penny Marshall's "Awakenings," one of the best films of 1990. In his review of the film, Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic called Williams a "unique maniacal treasure, part competent actor, part Jonathan Winters spin-off, part socio-political surgeon." Williams understood that there were essentially no laughs in the film, and that's how the role should be played. There wasn't even a slight hint of the screwball Tasmanian devil he so often became onscreen. In Mike Nichols' "The Birdcage," he understood that the humor there called for him to be the straight man (no pun intended), and while there were moments where Nichols let Williams be Williams, the actor understood that he often needed to cede the humor to Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman, Dianne Wiest and Hank Azaria. It is one of his very best works.

He knew how to play terrifying as well. 2002 was his Year of Hitchcock. The first pitted him against Al Pacino in Christopher Nolan's "Insomnia," taunting his opponent, an LA cop (Pacino) suffering from sleeplessness in Alaska while trying to solve a murder mystery. "Don't worry, Will," he whispers. "You can sleep when you're dead." That same year he played a terribly lonely photo developer who becomes dangerously obsessed with a family in "One Hour Photo." It was the dark characters that made Williams, an actor trained at Juilliard, the most interesting to watch. A perfect example is the last terrific film he made: "World's Greatest Dad," in 2009. I wrote at the time that it was the perfect visualization of the human need to provoke the sympathy of others, and that it was one of Williams' best films.

But Robin Williams will most likely be remembered for his outrageously funny performances: rapidly spitting out humor and slight diatribes in "Good Morning Vietnam," which earned him his first Oscar nomination (he was also nominated for "Dead Poets Society," "The Fisher King," and won for "Good Will Hunting"); being as equally funny to children as to adults in "Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest" and Disney's "Aladdin," in which he improvised 16 hours of material, so much that apparently the Academy turned down a request to be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay because so much of it was ad-libbed; and of course, his role as a divorced father so desperate to spend time with his children that he disguises himself as a British nanny in "Mrs. Doubtfire." I cannot think of a funnier performance on film, and it was a shame that he was not nominated for Best Actor.

I'm very skeptical of alternative medicine, and yet I can't not be intrigued by laugh therapy. Here's how the Cancer Center's page of the remedy opens: "We were born with the gift of laughter. Laughter is a natural medicine. It lifts our spirits and makes us feel happy. Laughter is a contagious emotion. It can bring people together. It can help us feel more alive and empowered."

Empowered. We are at our lowest when we are not. There are three obvious examples of how Williams utilized laughter therapy to empower others. The first regards his dear friend and roommate from Julliard. Lauren Lapalater at Buzzfeed has written a great article titled "The Lifelong Friendship of Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve." Read it, and you will come across a passage from Reeve's memoirs describing his fear heading into a risky surgery after his accident left him paralyzed: He describes a man walking in dressed as a doctor and speaking in a Russian accent, announcing that he was to perform a rectal exam on Reeve. Reeve wrote: "For the first time since the accident, I laughed. My old friend had helped me know that somehow I was going to be okay."

The second story involves another friend, Steven Spielberg, who directed Williams in "Hook," in which Williams plays a grown-up Peter Pan who has forgotten Neverland and now is a stern lawyer who doesn't spend time with his kids. Spielberg was filming "Schindler's List," an immensely taxing project that left him drained and depressed. It was Williams who called Spielberg, filming in Poland, to crack jokes and cheer him up. Spielberg called these "comic care packages over the telephone." The third example is not a real-life one, but a film: "Patch Adams." It's not a particularly good film, but it celebrates his unique gift of helping others through humor. Sometimes, that humor could be a bit too potent, as was the time he appeared on "Inside the Actor's Studio" (in what was probably the show's best episode). Apparently, an audience member was rushed to the hospital for a hernia--she was laughing so hard during Williams' appearance.

I haven't even mentioned his charity work: He was involved in about 50 charities, including the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. With Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg, he hosted "Comic Relief," raising funds to help the homeless. Crystal responded to the news on Twitter with simply "No words." Goldberg seconded: "BillyCrytal is right. There are NO words."

While death might be a cure, so too is laughter. Steve Allen told us that our world would be intolerable without laughter; John Cleese called laughter a force for democracy; Stephen Colbert noted that one cannot be laughing and be afraid at the same time. "If you're laughing," he said, "I defy you to be angry." And I defy you to find someone who has made us laugh as much as Robin Williams did. What great comfort laughing is, and what a great comfort Robin Williams has been to us all.