What Would Robin Williams Do?

How does Humanism respond when getting crushed by fascho culture?

Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, & Sammy Davis Jr. at the 26th Annual SHARE Boomtown Gala, Hollywood Palladium, Los Angeles, May 19th, 1979 © Jim Frank

One night performing my show Tings Dey Happen at The Marsh in 2007, I thought I could see the outline of Robin Williams front row, dead center. It was hard to see through the lights. Not knowing made me nervous. And the audience and he could tell I was nervous. But he was laughing and clapping, or at least the outline was. And then I caught a glimpse of his forearms, and they were so buff and hairy I knew it had to be him. I relaxed, and the audience relaxed, and it was a magical show.

After the show he and his wife Marsha Garces-Williams and Jeff Greenwald came backstage and he went off on an impromtu riff for half an hour on Richard Pryor days, (“Courvoisier and Coke…an acquired taste!”) USO tours, Afghan warlords. Yet it was the most self-effacing improvised brilliance, because it felt like it was his way of saying, "Thank you, I enjoyed the show." He spoke through his craft, a craft he was so committed to that when he spoke, everyone felt uplifted, illuminated, cared for.

Last month, I was reminded of this night when I rewatched the Robin Williams documentary Step Inside My Mind. What shines through as much as his genius imagination and soaring craft is his humanity. For someone who channeled so many people and voices, and so quickly, it felt like the joke was always on himself, or those in power. He, as the saying goes, comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. A trenchant humanism ran through all his work.

I thought of this as I read a piece about the art collective For Freedoms. They formed in 2016 partly in response to the first Trump campaign, and are most famous for making billboards with sly political art pieces that can veer ambiguous. The idea is to provoke, perhaps strike a discordant note in conservative hearts and minds. In the words of co-founder Hank Willis Thomas: “placing images in the public that are designed to encourage critical thinking and uplift joy and celebration is paramount to us. We believe that art is a tool for social change and inner meditation.”

For Freedoms Billboard by co-founder Hank Willis Thomas, St. Louis, MO 2018

They have gotten lots of press attention. And they also have their detractors. In a recent New York Times piece about their work, the Times journalist noted the response of one detractor who posted online, “Humanism isn’t the answer to white supremacy/colonialism. Get your neoliberal head out of your ass.”

I am, above all else, a humanist. This is rooted in a belief and life experience that connecting with other human beings across the divides is essential to building a society where we all have dignity and respect. It’s a huge source of joy. And it is also based on my formative experiences living in Nigeria, and experiencing a society in which basic human rights were tenuous, sometimes fleeting, sometimes absent.

In the avalanche of anti-humanitarian executive orders in Trump’s first few days (completely suspending the refugee asylum program tops my list as the most dispiriting and soulless), it reminded me of a journalist in Nigeria I met named Grace.

Grace was a journalist with CTL, a respected cable television news network. But her boss rarely paid her. She was expected to make a living on the “pay per play” system that dominates Nigerian media. Most of the time it was enough to feed, clothe and school her eight year-old daughter. When it wasn’t, she baked wedding cakes and sold them.

Billboard in Port Harcourt, Nigeria Celebrating then Governor of Rivers State Peter Odili. He was investigated for embezzling 67 million dollars.

This was nothing compared to what she experienced during the Abacha regime as a journalist. Sani Abacha is the consensus choice as Nigeria’s worst military dictator; when he died in the arms of two prostitutes on an apparent Viagra overdose, it was deemed “the coup from heaven.” For journalists, it was a dark time. During a press crackdown, soldiers threw Grace in the trunk of a car and drove to an empty field, where she was told to start walking. Instead of waiting for a bullet to the back of the head, Grace turned to the sergeant and politely said, “Give Colonel Amadu my warmest regards.” Spooked that he might be killing a friend of his commanding officer’s, the sergeant ordered her back into the car and drove back to the city. Grace didn’t know Colonel Amadu, but she knew he was a colonel and made a lucky guess. A year later, Abacha died and she was accepted to a three-month journalism training program in Florida.

I heard several similar near-death stories from Nigerians during dictatorship. And always there was a personal appeal to the apparatchik, a looking in someone’s eyes, a leveling with their killer as a human being. In fact, drawing on the withered humanity of their potential abuser/killer saved their life.

I am reminded of this every week in performing my new show Takes All Kinds. Sammy—who was a radical violent extremist in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and has since spent the last two decades de-radicalizing violent extremists—says, “the only way you pull people out is by showing them empathy when they least deserve it.”

That doesn’t mean he believes that’s all we should do. Some people can’t be reached until they bottom out, he believes. His program for rehabilitation of those lost in extremist hate groups had such impressive results it won a large federal grant during the waning days of the Obama administration. (The funding was then rescinded when Trump took office in 2017. But because Sammy’s work was so respected by FBI and anti-extremist police units, much of the promised grant money to expand the program was cobbled together through back channels.)

Of course we are still a country of laws, as pre-Trump presidents used to intone, and so the solution to mass deportations or the end of the asylum program is not just to look into the eyes of ICE agents and beg for mercy. Thank God there are thousands of lawyers and judges who will fight these battles in courts. But to simply say humanism has no role in stopping authoritarianism and cruelty is, in my experience, and in the stories of so many activists, social workers, and artists I’ve met, simply false.

The title of my show is from the phrase It Takes All Kinds To Make a World. It’s what James, a community organizer registering voters in Atlanta, says about working in the trenches of change. Elections have consequences, as these last two weeks have shown us with stunning sharpness. If someone’s best contribution to maintaining our humanity is to make a billboard that questions or complicates certain assumptions, so be it. If someone else is able to show someone empathy when they least deserve it so they can feel heard and might open up their mind and heart to a different perspective, great. And if you can make someone laugh so hard that they lose their rigid certainty about something, all the better.

For Freedoms Billboard on a lonely stretch of highway.

In a recent piece, Freddy Deboer writes “Our culture has erased transcendent meaning and left in its place short-form internet video, frothy pop music, limitless pornography, Adderall for the educated and fentanyl for the not, a ceaseless parade of minor amusements that distract but never satisfy. And people want to be satisfied; they want something durable. They want something to hold on to. They want to transcend the ordinary.” He worries there is going to be more nihilistic violence from young people in search of meaning.

What is clear in watching the Robin Williams documentary is how much meaning was pouring out of those clubs in the ‘80s when he burst onto the scene. People weren’t just getting craft and comedy—though they got that in spades. People were filled with a sense of meaning and awe. I create an art form that really can’t be replicated in other mediums. It doesn’t translate to video, even radio doesn’t do it justice, we don’t get the indelible physicality to go with the voice. It only really shines as an ephemeral thing to be experienced in person. I’m not so naive and elitist to think that theater will save us from fascism, but more than ever I feel that live performance helps maintain and restore our humanity.

It’s not measured in how many audience members are converted to one way of thinking. The point of art is to move and provoke, not convert. And indeed it is hard, as the great Mike Leigh says in a recent Marc Maron interview, to keep making art that is subtle and ambiguous and complicated in the face of the quasi-fascist onslaught that is the alternative—an endless parade of titillating videos of ever shorter length, low engagement/high judgement click bait, big screens with sports and cold beer, rollickingly cynical streaming series. I know because I’m a humanist and artist and still I self-anesthesize at times. What I would say to that commentator with disdain for For Freedoms billboards is this: It’s true, humanism might not save us from white supremacy. But staying cocooned in nihilism and your phone will do nothing to stop our collective dehumanization. Experience good art; get out in community and feel something. Make Theater Cool Again.