Modern right-on comedians are too predictable and insufficiently funny

Steve Martin called his 1978 double-platinum album A Wild and Crazy Guy. Martin of course was far from that. He looked and dressed like an accountant, and his trademark style for the past four decades has been precision-engineered comedy.

Few other Academy Awards hosts could have greeted their peers at the Kodak Theatre with the line: “Writers. Directors. Actors. If we’re stuck here tonight and run out of food, that’s the order in which we eat them.”

Martin emerged in the first big stand-up boom in the US when others coming to prominence included Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, following in the footsteps of the likes of Don Rickles and Joan Rivers.
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In 1985, Williams demonstrated his unpredictability by taking a theatrical detour playing Estragon to Martin’s Vladimir in a Broadway production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Your view of Williams’ work probably depends on which of his films you saw, just as your opinion of David Bowie could initially be guided on whether you discovered his music in the 1970s or 1980s.

If you watched Patch Adams and Toys alone, you’d never watch anything with his credits again. If you saw him eat up the screen in his movie breakthrough Good Morning Vietnam or his more measured performances in Dead Poets’ Society or Good Will Hunting, you’d be more generous.

This year there have been two in-depth evaluations of Williams’ work – the publication of Dave Itzkoff’s thorough biography Robin as well as Marina Zenovich’s HBO/Sky Atlantic documentary on Williams, Come Inside My Mind, two years after his suicide.

Neither spares detail in uncovering a complex individual who often chose the wrong tipple, the wrong relationship and, more often than not, the wrong film. Neither the book nor the film shirks from the controversy that surrounded Williams, from accusations of plagiarism around his stand-up material to substance abuse on the set of Mork and Mindy, and serial infidelities, or how much Williams felt threatened by up and coming film comedians like Jim Carrey.

It is also a story of wasted potential. Williams died after a struggle with Lewy body dementia. His comeback to TV sitcoms had not been a success and his last substantial film hit had been in 2002 (the darker suspense of One Hour Photo). Towards the end of his life, his wife would recall him telling her: “I just want to reboot my brain.”

Seeing the footage and the Williams mind in action ticking over made Brits of a certain age think of his peer, Billy Connolly.

As well as the Parkinson’s diagnoses (Connolly is happily alive but no longer touring), there was a similarity to their stand-up routines which almost inevitably led to the two becoming friends. Williams would accompany Connolly to Highland games near The Big Yin’s estate in Aberdeenshire.

Both men’s routines showed quicksilver minds at work which characterised an apparent lack of structure to their routines, but their grasp of technique ensured there would never be too many awkward pauses. Both overshared on personal problems and strongly held political opinions. Connolly has had more misses than hits on screen too.

Nonetheless, both Williams and Connolly on stage were unpredictable. That added to their appeal. Even the animators behind Disney’s Aladdin created a Genie around which Williams could ad-lib, knowing that this would elevate his performance and the subsequent film.

Now, our comedians in Britain from Jack Whitehall to Russell Howard, Josh Bishop to Michael McIntyre, routinely sell out the O2 so they’re hardly on their uppers.

On every reality show, talent show and the endless parade of panel shows, you can’t miss British stand-ups.

But the kind of freewheeling or unfashionable opinion which Williams or Connolly used to deliver on stage is sadly absent. Williams and Connolly stand out as being nothing like anything produced in comedy since perhaps Eddie Izzard.

Most of the panel show comedians in the UK seem concerned with being “on the right side of history” but are they on the right side of comedy? Applause is a frequent audience feature on Have I Got News and The Mash Report. Laughter less so. Most current comedians’ Twitter feeds, Bob Mortimer aside, do not feed their audience with jokes but synthetic outrage. The late Joan Rivers was concerned with getting a laugh even if “saying the unsayable” was involved. Stewart Lee plays with form in an interesting way but his routine on “political correctness gone mad” sets out a clear subtext to his own audience – people who complain about political correctness should look elsewhere.

How much would contemporary comedy benefit from an injection of the unpredictability delivered by Robin Williams?

Steve Martin once said: “What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.”

As this year’s documentary and biography on Williams illustrate, Williams’ made some poor film choices. But unlike so many modern comics he put the search for ideological purity above belly laughs.