Live 2002

AMG Review of Live 2002

William Ruhlmann
All Music Guide

Robin Williams has been surprisingly successful at locating cinematic vehicles that provide him with an opportunity to use his special comic gifts, namely a rapid-fire associational ability that finds him jumping from topic to topic as audiences, barely able to keep up, laugh at the juxtapositions as much as the jokes, and a talent for mimicry that extends beyond every known accent to include the imagined voices of a variety of inanimate objects. He has been so successful, in fact, that he has done relatively little of the work that best employs his attributes, standup comedy. But in 2002, after 16 years off the road working in Hollywood, Williams undertook a tour of North America chronicled on this two-CD set. Unlike the simultaneously released Live on Broadway DVD, which depicts the tour's final performance in New York City, the CD is culled from shows around the continent, though the material is essentially the same. While extremely topical, it demonstrates that the 50-year-old comedian remains what he always was, a baby boomer whose sensibility is informed by the drug humor of the 1970s. Sober as he may be today, Williams still comes across as the funniest guy at a pot party, his obscenity-laced aps filled with the facile leaps of logic a doper could best appreciate. That said, he is, as usual, hilarious, and not infrequently witty. His attack on golf, rendered, naturally, in a Scottish accent, is devastating, and his reflections on growing older hit home with his aging fans. The album's first disc contains the basic show, while the second disc devotes individual tracks to each of the cities on the tour, during which Williams speaks in local accents and tells local jokes that are well-appreciated by his listeners. Forget the films; this is what Robin Williams does best.