It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly eleven years since we lost the one-in-a-billion talent that was Robin Williams. Finding a funnier or more versatile actor would be impossible. Williams had an astounding range as a performer across genres and form. While he was a respected dramatic actor, winning an Academy Award for his role in Good Will Hunting, Williams is perhaps best-known and most beloved as a comedian. Williams began his career as a standup, found fame on the sitcom Mork and Mindy, then shot to superstardom with his comedy specials, plus films like Jumanji, Hook, and Mrs. Doubtfire.
Whenever Williams did show up on the small screen and not a multi-million dollar movie, it felt as if we were getting a special visit from the actor, and here are the seven appearances that had us laughing the hardest.
1) Happy Days
The sitcom Happy Days, set in Milwaukee and about a middle-class working family, is about as grounded a premise as one can get. However, creator Garry Marshall was inspired to bring an extraterrestrial character on the show at the behest of his son, and the fifth season episode “My Favorite Orkan” was born. The episode was an uphill battle at every turn for Marshall, who faced pushback from both from ABC and the cast of Happy Days about introducing an alien, on the show, until he auditioned a young Robin Williams back in 1978.
Williams’s performance as Mork from Ork didn’t merely allow the episode come together, he was so instantly memorable and charismatic that it spurred the spinoff series, Mork and Mindy, which starred Williams and Pam Dawber, and ran for four seasons.
2) The Richard Pryor Show
One of the words to best describe Williams’s comedy is “fearless,” and that quality was on full display in a bold, unapologetic sketch of The Richard Pryor Show in 1977 that satirized the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Pryor plays the white prosecutor defending the woman with a baseless claim that a Black man raped her, and Williams plays the self-important Yankee lawyer defending him. It’s gold to watch these two comedic legends face off in the fictional courtroom and all while cracking us up with absurdity of America’s antiquated segregation laws and riffs on Mockingbird’s iconic characters.
3) Sesame Street
Williams was no stranger to pushing the envelope comedically, he also proved he could keep it kid-friendly and still crack an audience up. There’s no better example of Williams’s quick improv skills and boundless imagination than in guest appearance on Sesame Street in 1991. Riffing of a script written by Sonia Manzano, it’s jaw-dropping how many uses Williams cycles through for the stick before ultimately giving it to Elmo. Williams does everything from play hockey to impersonate John Wayne with the bare bones prop. The result is as hilarious as it is wholesome.
4) Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Robin Williams’s guest appearance on the classic improv sketch show Whose Line is it Anyway? is one for the ages. The story goes Williams was in L.A. for a project and was a fan of the show, and therefore graciously accepted the invitation to appear on Whose Line. The result was twenty or so minutes of tear-inducing laughter. Surrounded by fellow improvisers, all at the top of their game, Williams could really let it rip. There’s not a single game — Party Quirks, Scene from a Hat, Hollywood Director — where he misses, but our personal favorite is Duet. Williams and Wayne Brady serenade an audience member, an air traffic controller, in roof-raising gospel hymn fashion.
5) Friends
As if Friends wasn’t a big enough hit, Williams and fellow comedy legend Billy Crystal dropped by Central Perk to give the show an extra dose of star power and hilarity in 1997. In the Season 3 episode, “The One with the Ultimate Fighting Champion”, Monica (Courtney Cox) readies to tell her friends a story, except they’re interrupted by Tomas (Williams) and Tim (Crystal). The two men scoot themselves into the rest of the cast’s personal space, then Tomas proceeds to tell Tim he suspects his wife is having an affair with her gynecologist. Tim confesses it’s him who she’s having an affair with, and the pair storm out of the coffee shop, Monica, and everyone else for that matter speechless. The cameo was spur of the moment on both Williams and Crystal’s part, and the pair completely improvised their characters’ uproarious plight.
6) Saturday Night Live
Williams hosted sketch comedy institution Saturday Night Live three times over the course of his career, and SNL’s opening monologue slot provided the actor with the perfect platform for Williams to remind us all of the incredible standup he was. The first time he hosted in 1984, Williams used the monologue to wax poetic about the Summer Olympics that were taking place, as well as to contrast the joys of parenting with the pitfalls of celebrity fatherhood. Williams’s monologue is barely four minutes, but it’s a nonstop comedy tour-de-force that perfectly spotlights his relentless, brilliant brand of standup comedy.
7) The Larry Sanders Show
Williams played a fictionalized version of himself on The Larry Sanders Show, appearing as a guest on the star’s late night talk show. Throughout the Season One episode “Hank’s Contract,” Williams proved that he could be just as funny with biting and contained humor as he was in his signature manic, larger-than-life style. His muttered insults and pleas for validation from Sanders (Garry Shandling) are subtly but lethally funny as he plays into and plays up the simmering tension between Sanders and his slighted sidekick Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tamor) throughout the episode. His appearance on Larry Sanders proves that Williams could tackle any genre, any tone, any character — even himself.
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