Na-Nu Na-Nu, or Why Our Funny Bones are Broken

A close friend of mine and I have talked before about the fact that I have come to expect celebrity-related bad news from her, as she was the one who told me of Amy Winehouse's death and then Paul Walker's. Feeling it was her duty, she sent me a text two nights ago telling me that Robin Williams had died and I was of course immediately upset. When I learned moments later that it had been a suicide, I had to suppress the instinct to cry. Yesterday it seemed to me that everyone I talked to was particularly saddened by Robin Williams' death. Yes, I know there are people all over the world (and in relative abundance pretty close to where I live) who see death in a much closer form every other week or even everyday, but for the fortunate of us who are less accustomed to it, celebrity deaths sometimes hit hard. On what is probably a stragely regular basis I find myself super bummed out when I think about Michael Jackson, even though he was somebody that I'd never met and he died over five years ago. Honestly, I get sad when I think about John Lennon's death and that happened nine years before I was born. Even today we learned that a screen legend of over seven decades had died, and yet still that news is over-shadowed by grief over Robin Williams. So the question is why, if celebrity deaths usually make us a little sad, do some make us feel as if someone we knew personally had died? In the case of Robin Williams, there seems to be at least a few different reasons.

The first and most obvious one for people around my age (the so-called "millennials") is that Robin Williams felt like a big part of our childhoods. Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji, Aladdin, Hook, Flubber, even Popeye and Patch Adams, were movies that we'd all seen a hundred times and from which we could quote whole scenes by memory. They were movies aimed at us that we actually not only enjoyed, but loved wholeheartedly, and that our parents also loved. These were the movies that we watched after school that didn't embarrass us for being childish, and that's not just because they were actually funny, but also because Mrs. Doubtfire and the Genie didn't treat us childishly. Robin Williams was making movies for kids that took kids seriously as human beings, with complex emotions that were difficult to understand on our own. He helped us through our parents' divorces and through knowing other kids that were sick, and mostly, he helped us laugh and forget for a little while about the inherent loneliness of childhood. And when we got older and re-watched Good Will Hunting and Dead Poets Society from the viewpoint of people trying to transition from our teens into adulthood, he found a way to soothe us through that, too.

For some of us, he was also the master teacher of his specific trade. When I was growing up, if any adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I invariably answered the same thing: "Actress, writer, comedienne." I grew up worshiping the players of Studio 8H and The Kids in the Hall (I was kind of a weird kid...), and the rest of the late night comedy droves. I was caught somewhere between watching this adult comedy and watching the goofy stuff that was meant to make kids my age laugh, and luckily, so was Robin Williams. There was always something timeless about the way he made you laugh in that it worked on everyone equally- young and old- and as a kid, you could sense that, even though you didn't get to bear witness to the years of hilarity that had already solidified him as a god well before you were born.

For people my parents' age, his death is probably even worse, though they are better equipped to deal with shocking hero-type deaths. My parents, for example, clearly remember and often reference watching the very first episode of Saturday Night Live. They remember going to the movies to see The Producers, and the meteoric rise of Steve Martin.  Their early adulthood was dominated by undisputed geniuses of comedy, and they certainly recall the first time they saw the young, endearing alien named Mork.

Here was the embodiment of the radical shift from the perfectly normal Happy Days to the totally weird and alien, the new comedy. He was young like them, and they got to watch him grow and become this immense talent right before their eyes, and even though his less wholesome antics were well-known, he was always someone you liked and wished well.

Really, what makes Robin Williams' death seem to sting a bit worse than some other famous deaths, is that it was self-inflicted. This was the man who made us laugh so hard we got stitches in our sides and even found ourselves unabashedly guffawing over when we remembered that scene from Mrs. Doubtfire while riding on the bus and realizing we'd forgotten to shave our legs. And he was so sad, so deep into despair that he felt he had no possibility of ever crawling back out. We can't help but feel like we failed him in returning the favor of making him smile. I read this morning his daughter Zelda Williams' beautiful statement in response to his passing, in which she urges us to "work twice as hard" at filling the void of laughter this loss has left. We can certainly try, but I wonder if we will ever shake that collective twinge of regret that we didn't do enough to make him smile.