Robin Williams dead at 63: The comedian had poignant reaction to being called ... - New York Daily News

Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images ‘The idea of the sad clown thing, I think it’s the idea of you’re funny and then there’s that moment of tenderness,’ Robin Williams said at the TCA panel.

Maybe Robin Williams was fascinated by the sad clown because he knew him from the mirror.

He may not have ridden his bike around Tiburon, Calif,, in a “Sad Clown” T-shirt, but the phrase resonated sharply when he sat on a panel last August promoting his then-new CBS sitcom “The Crazy Ones” for TV critics and writers.

A questioner asked if Williams’ character on the show, a wildly creative and unorthodox genius who also had to hold an agency together, contained little sprinkles of Pagliacci, because “there’s nothing more heart-wrenching than the sad clown.”

Williams, who had been fairly quiet until that point, jumped on the phrase and went into a mime routine of breaking into tears before thanking everyone for their sympathy cards.

He then kept it going with a different joke, about meeting “a sad clown you wake up next to and go, ‘What are those big feet doing in my bed’?”

When the discussion turned elsewhere, Williams moved it back several times to the phrase.

“The idea of the sad clown thing, I think it’s the idea of you’re funny and then there’s that moment of tenderness,” he said. “But sometimes you have to be very careful that it doesn’t go into saccharine or too much sentimental.”

Asked what makes him happy these days, he first joked, “I was going to say free-basing, but ix-nay.”

Seriously, he said, “My family, work and, I think, being around and creating. When I’m not doing this show, I get to do something called ‘Set List’ once in a while. It’s like an improv show where you get seven suggestions and you put together an improvised set like a standup comedy set. That’s a joy.

“That’s the happy clown.”

It’s no secret that happy and sad was a tough issue for Williams, who struggled all his life with manic depression brought on by bipolar disorder.

It was a struggle compounded, ironically, by his success. Once he became Robin Williams, internationally known comedian, people expected that’s who he would always be.

Asked if public expectation put pressure on him, he responded first with a diversionary joke, saying, “Well, now that I have a moral GPS on my phone, it’s been lovely. Because the girl you are texting is the same age as your daughter. Reroute.”

More seriously?

“I think the pressure to be funny all the time, it’s like dance, you know, dance funny, man,” he said. “I think sometimes there’s that pressure. Other times it’s like, with this room, good luck.”

Richard Cartwright/AP Robin Williams, left, and the cast of ‘The Crazy Ones.’ He lobbied for the show to receive a second season, but it was canceled after one year.

In a second “Crazy Ones” panel for TV writers this January, Williams suggested there was another dimension here, which was the pressure he put on himself.

Anyone who saw him on late-night TV occasionally had the mildly uneasy sense that he couldn’t stop himself, and he suggested to TV writers that could be partly true.

He was talking about how, off-camera, he would try to get a laugh out of “Crazy Ones” co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar. He loved her, he said, and part of what he loved was that she wouldn’t just laugh at anything. There was a challenge. He had to be good.

“I work for laughter,” he said. “It’s that kind of thing. You get a laugh, you go, ‘Yeah, I’m okay now.’ You want to get that moment. And sometimes it works and other times, no.

“It becomes very sad for a moment. The desperate comic boy comes out and you start doing little voices. You’re going, ‘Now you’re desperate, boy. Let it go.’”

As a panelist, Williams played his position. He wasn’t the TV guest who consumed all the oxygen in the room.

Still, on both occasions, he regularly dropped in one-liners like “I went to rehab in wine country because I wanted to keep my options open.”

MELINDA SUE GORDON/AP Robin Williams wears a clown’s nose in the 1997 film ‘Patch Adams.’ The late actor seemed fascinated by the idea of the ‘sad clown.’

When fellow cast member Hamish Linklater joked that Williams and Gellar were “our Irish helium captains” because they kept the show’s spirit buoyed, Williams burst into “Danny Boy.”

He was later asked what he thought when he saw one of the show’s props, a huge picture of him on the wall of the ad agency.

“It’s like being on drugs again,” he said. “It’s very surreal.

"Yeah, that giant picture. That was the first day I walked on the set and I went, ‘Oh, okay, no pressure.’"

Williams lobbied for “The Crazy Ones,” which had borderline ratings, to get a second season. CBS decided no. A few months later Williams checked himself into rehab for what he called a “freshening up” of his sobriety.

One morning six weeks later, the sad clown who left ‘em laughing didn’t wake up at all.

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