The Sweet Story Behind the Viral Clip of Robin Williams Being Difficult

Thanks to the world’s boundless appreciation for Robin Williams, old clips of the late comedian tend to go viral every so often — whether it’s a depressing deleted scene from Mrs. Doubtfire, or an old outtake of Williams improvising with Sesame Street’s Elmo.

The latest piece of Williams footage to capture the internet’s attention finds him relentlessly riffing while an exasperated commercial director tries to get the actor to perform just one simple line. Williams does an assortment of goofy voices, physical shtick and ultimately concludes the video by proclaiming, “I realized I was a heavy drinker when I woke up nude on the hood of my car with my keys in my ass.” 

Meanwhile an off-screen voice bemoans: “Can we get another actor in, please?”

The post is slightly misleading; this isn’t the case of Williams sparring with “a director that had no sense of humor.” The director in question was Howard Storm, who worked on a number of classic TV series, but most importantly, directed the majority of Mork & Mindy episodes. Williams trusted his director, who gave him more creative freedom than the show’s writers and producers. Williams even assigned Storm a nickname: “Papa” — not because he was old, but because he had a beard that made him resemble Ernest Hemingway. 

Which isn’t to say that Williams’ untethered comic style didn’t sometimes frustrate Storm. As the director revealed in the biography Robin by Dave Itzkoff, during the first week of production on Mork & Mindy, he was “frightened to death.” “Robin didn’t say a sentence that was written,” Storm recalled. “I didn’t hear a word of the script. And I thought on Thursday: ‘This is it. I’m finished. It’s over. What are we going to do? He doesn’t know the lines. It’s my responsibility.’” But Williams learned his lines just in time for the shoot, filling Storm with a sense of relief. “Oh, thank God, my job is safe. I don’t have to become a shoe salesman,” he told himself at the time. 

In 1981, Storm went into the commercial business, and he enlisted the help of his old friend. “I thought it would be a great Idea if we could get Robin to do a little promo for us. And I asked him and he was perfectly willing,” Storm explained in the documentary Eye of the Storm.

Still, this clip is frequently shared online with descriptions alleging that Williams is truly “refusing” direction during a commercial shoot, and “intentionally pissing off the director.” While Williams’ improvisations were clearly unscripted, seemingly the central conceit was staged as a part of the promotional gimmick. At the end of the video, Williams delivers the line that makes this clear: “You see how much patience this man has? Howard Storm is now directing commercials. If he can work with me, he can work with anyone.”

So it’s not that he was being a dick to a humorless ad man, he was literally doing a favor for an old friend who has worked in the comedy industry for decades. 

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