Steve Pulaski
As of yesterday, August 11, 2014, Robin Williams: Weapons of Self Destruction stands as the final televised comedy special by the man we'll ever see, and to leave a career off on this particular show isn't at all a bad thing. At fifty-eight years old at the time of filming this, Williams seems as energetic and zealous as ever, prancing around the stage for eighty-nine minutes, with no breaks or intermissions, showing himself as a nonstop comedic force of nature. In such a short time, Williams show himself doing great impressions, questioning life, and doing something few film roles allowed him to do - be so brazenly crude and bawdy.Despite his crudeness, Williams entices with a certain sense of wit and wordplay to his mannerisms and lectures. Williams, for one, transitions from topic-to-topic, regardless of how outlandish the previous topic was, smoothly and fearlessly, never missing a beat or interrupting himself, resulting in a lost sense of continuity. In five minutes, Williams amusingly and thoughtfully discusses wildfires, marijuana, tornadoes, and hurricanes, making easy transitions into each topic. He continues on by frequently dropping hilarious jokes, such as the commonality between a tornado and a divorce in the south is that someone inevitably loses a trailer and that the reasons Germany doesn't have any comedians or funny personalities is because they tried to kill them all decades back.Arguably the most entertaining is when Williams reminds us how asinine our recent history has been, saying that "it's like we've been on the drug 'f*** it all' for the past eight years," as he recounts political events from 2000 to 2008. Through and through, Williams is entertaining as hell, spirited, clearly working off of ample amounts of energy, not fumes of it, and offering advice and keen observations at every turn. He even gives us one of the most memorable statements on marriage I've ever heard which is, "there are penalties for early withdrawal and depositing into another account." Directed by: Marty Callner.
tbagletsbeef
I have a lot of respect for robin & I think he is a fantastic actor, both Comedy wise & in his more sombre roles. However, I found very little funny about this show. Maybe it's my Australian sense of humor or maybe I expected something more akin to Lee Mack or Dave Chappelle. Unfortunately it was neither...instead it was a nervous sounding robin doing impressions of Hasidic Jews, old southerners making stupid noises and then shooting off to some completely unrelated subject like heart surgery or Obama. After the first time struggling to sit it through it I thought...well maybe I didn't approach it with the right mindset. Maybe I was just not used to his style of comedy. So I watched it again and no..I stand by my original opinion. But hey comedy is like apples & oranges, just so happens i'm not a fan of citrus.
schf
Embarrassed for him .Shame because there were some genius stuff trying to get out during this show but most of his verbage fell flat. He completely lost the audience who had to wade through ten minutes of dross for a good joke and were less forgiving each time.Williams occasionally looks like he knows hes not exactly got them eating out of the palm of his hands,with a manic edge to his laughter and too much desperate sweating. Sad to see its come to this really, one of the best comedians of our time reduced to this.He really doesn't need to put himself through it any more ,he certainly doesn't need the money .Time to hang up the mike before the audience completely gives up on him.
bob the moo
I recently managed to catch Robin Williams' big return to HBO and I was looking forward to some typical manic humour from him, which is pretty much what he delivers. The problem is that he still needs good material to deliver in this way and there are substantial chunks of this special when the material is not as strong as he should be doing. He dabbles into political comedy but he does so in a manner that makes him come over like he is trying to do someone else's act – it just doesn't sit well with the rest of the stuff he is doing. Put with this the fact that a lot of the material he is doing is not topical – I know I saw this several months after it aired in the US but even in December 2009 some of this stuff was done and done. It is still pretty funny but it is not as hilarious as he is trying to make it, nor as funny as the audience reaction captured suggests.Likewise some of his stuff is very crude and some of the laughs seem to be coming from the stuff he is saying being shocking. Of course this is nothing need in comedy and there is always a place for those who say the unsayable but do so in a very clever and well-delivered fashion – but this is not happening here. Williams does have some great observations with this stuff but mostly he is playing it a bit too obvious and childish for my tastes. Fortunately neither the political stuff nor the crude stuff makes up the majority of the show. There are other things in here and some of them are relevant to him and personal to him; his bits on alcoholism and drugs I found very funny but also well informed and it is just a shame he could not have done more from that direction rather than miming out his bodily functions with as much regularity as he did (pun unintentional).There is one thing above all else that makes this (admittedly too long) special work though, even as it dips at times and that is the man himself. Williams manic stuff has always worked well for me and since Mork has been his trademark and there is no sign that he has lost his touch there because his delivery and work is impressive. He nails the better material with this approach and he also carries the weaker stuff, taking the audience with him even when the joke he is doing is not that funny. The only slight wobble he has in that regard is when he does quite a lot of racial/national stereotypes and accents in one tight segment – you can feel the audience not really being sure if it is something they should be laughing at, but by force of his personality alone Williams takes them with him right through that mire.Is "Weapons" a great comedy show? Well to be honest no, too much of the material feels a little "base" in its content but Williams just about holds it together by sheer will and presence. He carries the audience and the viewer through the weaker material, moving quickly and frantically to distract us and provides plenty of good laughs on the stronger material to make us focus on that. Not quite great but he is undoubtedly good at what he does.
