Robin Williams is dead.
I was one of the Mork generation of Williams’ audience. I didn’t become a huge fan, but there were a couple of bits of his later work that I loved: Awakenings was one, which attacked the normal Hollywood narrative around miracle cures and preferred an air of reality to the Magic Negro trope it set itself up to deliver, and A Night at the Met.
A Night at the Met was, in retrospect, profoundly important to me. As a performance, it’s a wonderful (worn out) tape. It’s a hilarious romp across Williams’ life to that point. It has many quotable moments. But it has different import to me.
On those occasions I talk to people about how I try to parent, I throw out that Terry Pratchett is my greatest source of parenting advice. It’s a good throwaway line, but it’s also quite true: Vimes’ devotion to being back every day to read a bedtime story, his philosophy that once you let something be more important than time with your kids, you’ll find it whittled down to nowt? For me, that resonates, and it fundamentally changed how I approach my working life, my hobbies, how I arrange things to try and make sure my kids get me.
But thinking about it today, I realise there’s actually a more important influence, and it’s that Williams routine.
There is a lot of comedy about having children, but it often tends to the negative; a routine to the effect that being a parent is awful, and children are unbearable. Williams was probably the first comedian I encountered whose routine about being a parent was about what peculiar little marvels they are. The ruminations captured in A Night at the Met is a delight, not just because on those rare occasions I’ve come home from a work function the worse for wear I delight in mis-quoting the line “Here’s a change, Daddy’s going to throw up on you”, but because it speaks so much of the way in which children are not burdens, but crazy little people who are terrifyingly dependent on us.
So sure, Pratchett has been one of my parenting guides. But maybe without Williams, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a father at all. And it is the reason I see my daughters as bizarre little people; not pets, not automata, not clones waiting to be stuffed with coulda-woulda-shouldas from my life, but little people in their own right.