Word: mimes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Placing someone with paranormal powers among ordinary people is a classic conceit used by many television shows, including Bewitched, My Favorite Martian and I Dream of Jeannie. But Williams' pastiche of mime, light-speed improvisation and complex clowning is giving that one-joke vehicle a new velocity. Delivered with his engagingly boyish grin and calculated inflections, such gibberish as "nano, nano" (meaning hello) and "nimnul" (meaning jerk) can send audiences?and producers?into paroxysms of delight: last week the show shot up to seventh place in the Nielsens. "This guy is going to be a superstar with or without this...
...College and the College of Marin, he and his companion decided to become performers. Although his indignant father advised him to study welding so he would at least have a marketable skill, Robin won an acting scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York, where he earned money performing mime in whiteface in front of the Metropolitan Museum. In 1976 he returned to San Francisco and met Valerie Velardi, a dancer whom he married last June. Valerie organized and catalogued his routines, and persuaded him to try his act in Los Angeles. With no portfolio, no resume, no connections, Robin...
...Angeles and a weekend house at Zuma Beach that they share with a parrot named Cora and two iguanas (one of which is named Truman Capote because, as Robin explains, "he's cold-blooded"). Robin's sketches, however, occasionally reflect the ironies of Celluloid City. One, called the "Hollywood Mime," for instance, has a character dancing from door to door in Hollywood, banging on each and smiling hopefully until the smile literally falls off his face and has to be pasted back on. Robin Williams should have no such tribulations: his is stuck tight with Krazy Glue...
...premise more appropriate to Saturday morning TV than prime time, but Williams transforms trivia into a tour de force. He speaks in dozens of different voices that ape the sounds of computers and animals as well as other show-biz personalities. He tosses off inventive bits of mime and times his lines with a precision that rivals Johnny Carson's. Though the gags are vintage My Favorite Martian, Williams' improvisational verve makes them irresistible. In a matter of weeks, children all over the country will be imitating Mork's vocabulary of alien sounds. Otherwise rational adults...
...goes on to stock questions that permit the young Senator to rattle off his policy positions by rote. Murrow's notion of challenging Bogart, Bacall and Monroe is to ask them to name their favorite film roles. He even allows Harpo Marx to make all his responses in mime; the audience, no doubt, had tuned in with the expectation that Harpo would speak...