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blast from the past

Robin Williams—the comedic genius

We all know the late, great Robin Williams was a comic genius. Many people also know that he was classically trained in theater. In a recently unearthed clip from 1991, Williams combines those two talents, leaving people splitting at the seams even decades later.

Williams was a guest on “The Tonight Show” starring Johnny Carson, when he and Carson began chatting about William Shakespeare, who Williams quickly quipped was a “man with a second grade education, [who] wrote some of the greatest poetry of all time, and sometimes I think, maybe not.”

Carson then asked Williams how he felt about other actors playing Hamlet (for context, Mel Gibson had recently starred in the role). Williams, being no stranger to the Bard’s work, then went into one of his delightfully creative frenzies, managing to effortlessly slide into the voices of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jack Nicholson while throwing out verses like it was nothing.

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