Russell Brand Pens Touching, Poignant Eulogy to Robin Williams

Russell Brand spoke his piece regarding the death of fellow comedian Robin Williams. And, like Williams often did, Brand spoke tenderly from the heart.

Brand, star of the recent remake of Arthur, penned a column for the Guardian lamenting on the loss of the 63-year-old comedian and actor, who took his own life by hanging himself with a belt. The Mirror reports that Brand reveals that he had been “thinking about Robin Williams a bit recently.”

Admiring Williams’ talent, Brand wrote: “Robin Williams was exciting to me because he seemed to be sat upon a geyser of comedy. Like he didn’t manufacture it laboriously within but had only to open a valve and it would come bursting through in effervescent jets. He was plugged into the mains of comedy.”

Brand continues:

“He spoke candidly about his mental illness and addiction, how he felt often on a precipice of self-destruction, whether through substance misuse or some act of more certain finality. “I thought that this articulate acknowledgement amounted to a kind of vaccine against the return of such diseased thinking, which has proven to be hopelessly naive.”

In his column, Brand mused on the Oscar winner’s personality by adding: “A refinement of an energy that could turn as easily to destruction as creativity.”

Usmagazine.com reports that Brand recalls growing up watching Williams’ frenetic energy serving as a panacea for the sadness of everyone’s lives except his own. Williams “spoke candidly about his mental illness and addiction,” Brand admitted that he “thought that his articulate acknowledgement amounted to a kind of vaccine against the return of such diseased thinking, which was proven to be hopelessly naive.”

“We live in a world that has become so negligent of human values that our brightest lights are extinguishing themselves,” Brand wrote.

“Robin Williams could have touched anyone in the world on the shoulder and told them he felt down and they would have told him not to worry, that he was great, that they loved him. He must have known that. He must have known his wife and kids loved him, that his mates all thought he was great, that millions of strangers the world over held him in their hearts, a hilarious stranger that we could rely on to anarchically interrupt, the all-encompassing sadness of the world.” However, he added, “Today Robin Williams is [now] part of the sad narrative that we used to turn to him to disrupt.”

Brand concludes, “What I might do is watch Mrs Doubtfire. Or Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting and I might be nice to people, mindful today how fragile we all are, how delicate we are, even when fizzing with divine madness that seems like it will never expire.”

And our greatest weapon against that madness is gone, far too soon.