ABC, via Photofest
Jonathan Winters, seated, with Robin Williams and Pam Dawber on the sitcom “Mork & Mindy.”
By ROBIN WILLIAMS
Published: April 15, 2013
My father’s laughter introduced me to the comedy of Jonathan Winters. My
dad was a sweet man, but not an easy laugh. We were watching Jack Paar
on “The Tonight Show” on our black-and-white television, and on came
Jonathan in a pith helmet.
Multimedia
NBC Jonathan Winters filling in for Jack Paar in 1960.
“Who are you?” Paar asked.
“I’m a great white hunter,” Jonathan said in an effete voice. “I hunt mainly squirrels.”
“How do you do that?”
“I aim for their little nuts.”
My dad and I lost it. Seeing my father laugh like that made me think, “Who is this guy and what’s he on?”
A short time later, Jonathan was on Paar again. This time Jack handed
him a stick, and what happened next was extraordinary. Jon did a
four-minute freestyle riff in which that stick became a fishing rod, a
spear, a giant beetle antenna, even Bing Crosby’s golf club complete
with song. Each transformation was a cameo with characters and sound
effects. He was performing comedic alchemy. The world was his
laboratory. I was hooked.
Not only was Jonathan funny on TV, but his comedy albums are also
auditory bliss. One of my favorite routines involved a mad scientist who
sounded like Boris Karloff. But instead of creating a Frankenstein, he
made thousands of little men that he unleashed on the world. His shocked
assistant cried out, “What are they looking for?”
The professor replied, “Little women, you fool.”
He also created comic characters like Maude Frickert and the overgrown
child Chester Honeyhugger. In one classic pre-P.C.-era routine, he had
Maude being molested by a huge farmhand. She protested, “Stop, I’m
church people.” After he had his way, he was off to do his chores, and
she called out, “Don’t be long.”
Mort Sahl said Jonathan was seen as a great improviser, but to him he
was just being himself. He was a rebel without a pause, whether he was
portraying the WASP who couldn’t get a decent martini in Mombasa or the
cowboy who couldn’t ride a horse and backed out of frame. Jonathan’s
wife, Eileen, maybe had the best quote. She said that Jonathan went
through his terrible 2’s but that they lasted 20 years.
In 1981, my sitcom “Mork & Mindy” was about to enter its fourth and
final season. The show had run its course and we wanted to go out
swinging. The producers suggested hiring Jonathan to play my son, who
ages backward. That woke me out of a two-year slump. The cavalry was on
the way.
Jonathan’s improvs on “Mork & Mindy” were legendary. People on the
Paramount lot would pack the soundstage on the nights we filmed him. He
once did a World War I parody in which he portrayed upper-class English
generals, Cockney infantrymen, a Scottish sergeant no one could
understand and a Zulu who was in the wrong war. The bit went on so long
that all three cameras ran out of film. Sometimes I would join in, but I
felt like a kazoo player sitting in with Coltrane.
On one of his first days on the show, a young man asked Jonathan how to
get into show business. He said: “You know how movie studios have a
front gate? You get a Camaro with a steel grill, drive it through the
gate, and once you’re on the lot, you’re in showbiz.”
No audience was too small for Jonathan. I once saw him do a hissing cat for a lone beagle.
His comedy sometimes had an edge. Once, at a gun show, Jon was looking
at antique pistols and a man asked if he was a gun proponent. He said:
“No, I prefer grenades. They’re more effective.”
Earlier in his life, he had a breakdown and spent some time in a mental
institution. He joked that the head doctor told him: “You can get out of
here. All you need is 57 keys.” He also hinted that Eileen wanted him
to stay there at least until Christmas because he made great ornaments.
Even in his later years, he exorcised his demons in public. His car had
handicap plates. He once parked in a blue lane and a woman approached
him and said, “You don’t look handicapped to me.”
Jonathan said, “Madam, can you see inside my mind?”
If you wanted a visual representation of Jonathan’s mind, you’d have to
go to his house. It is awe-inspiring. There are his paintings (a
combination of Miró and Navajo); baseball memorabilia; Civil War pistols
and swords; model airplanes, trains, and tin trucks from the ’20s;
miniature cowboys and Indians; and toys of all kinds.
We shared a love of painted military miniatures. He once sent me four
tiny Napoleonic hookers in various states of undress with a note that
read, “For zee troops!”
But the toys were a manifestation of a dark time in his life. Jonathan
was a Marine who fought in the Pacific in World War II. When he came
home from the war, he went to his old bedroom and discovered that his
prized tin trucks were gone.
He asked his mother what she did with his stuff.
“I gave them to the mission,” she said.
“Why did you do that?”
“I didn’t think you were coming back,” she replied.
Jonathan has shuffled off this mortal coil. So here’s to Jonny Winters, the cherubic madman with a stick who touched so many. Damn, am I going to miss you!
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