Robin Williams
Verizon Arena, Oct. 10
He sweated a lot, but so would you if you chattered deliriously for more than 90 minutes in front of nearly 4,000. Otherwise, Robin Williams looked no worse for the wear seven months after open-heart surgery. In fact, if his unrelenting barrage of spastic free associations, impressions and sex jokes left anyone exhausted, it was this reviewer. Laughing hurts after a while.
But, of course, restraint has never really been Robin William’s thing. He joked, at one point, that he’d gone to rehab in wine country “to keep his options open” and compared using Viagra after open-heart surgery to “a Civil War reenactment with loaded weapons.”
Those sort of juxtaposed one-liners came out more than you might expect amidst otherwise staccato riffing. The best were topical, if sometimes dated. A Prius, he imagined in an Arkansas redneck voice, “looks like a Volkswagen fucked a golf car.” Another car joke: “Arnold Schwarzenegger is a liberal Republican. It’s like a Volvo with a gun rack.” The idea of a George W. Bush Presidential Library sounds about as reasonable as a Col. Saunders culinary event, he said after making the same, tired Clinton-Library-as-mobile-home joke. Later, he admitted that Bush is like a “self-opening piñata” for a comedian, before cracking that “it’s bad when the smart brother is named Jeb.”