Damon Wayans Says Robin Williams ‘Would Steal Material’
Joke thievery is just part of the comedy game, Damon Wayans told Shannon Sharpe last week on his Club Shay Shay podcast. Even the most famous comedians would borrow a punchline or two, Wayans explained. “Robin Williams was a notorious thief. I ain’t lying.”
Wayans made no bones about it. “Robin was all stream of consciousness, and he would steal material,” he continued. “Comedians would go, ‘I’m not going on ‘cause Robin’s here.’”
Why sit out a night of comedy? Doing stand-up on a night when Williams was performing might mean he’d deliver your best joke on national television later that week.
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Comic Richard Lewis was a friend of Williams but understood other comedians getting angry. “Robin could take a premise or a joke and then go off on it and make it better, because he was a genius,” Lewis said, according to the biography Robin. “But a premise is gold. If a young comic has four, five minutes and he’s going to go on The Tonight Show, and all of a sudden, Robin does three of his jokes, he’s fucked. So yeah, there’s real reason for some of these people to have tremendous hostility.”
In fact, one comic allegedly threw Williams against a wall and demanded 300 bucks for a stolen routine. Williams paid up.
That was a regular occurrence, according to Wayans: “His manager used to walk around with a checkbook.” When Robin would come off stage, a fellow comedian could find the manager and detail any stolen jokes. Boom — Williams’ manager would write a check for $75.
It’s just what happens with certain kinds of comedians, Wayans explained to Sharpe. “The mind just works, and it’s grabbing stuff,” he told Sharpe. That’s especially true for comics not known for writing jokes, the kind who just take the stage and talk. “Katt Williams talks. Steve Harvey talks. And the first thing that comes to mind is what you say. But sometimes the first thing that came to your mind is somebody else’s joke.”
Williams described it the same way. “If you hang out in comedy clubs, when I was doing it, almost 24/7, you hear things,” he once said. “Then if you’re improvising, all of a sudden, you repeat it, going, ‘Oh shit.’ My brain was working that way.”
But unlike the comedian who threw Williams against a wall, Wayans never took offense when Williams or others borrowed a punchline. “I always look at comedy like this: If it’s not the last joke I’m ever going to tell, I ain’t gonna treat it like that,” he reasoned. “You ain’t take my wife or my kid. It is just a joke.”
