ROBIN Williams, fresh from singing “Blame Canada” at the Oscars, has become a geek.
He now jokes about Pentium 3 PCs, discusses AOL’s purchase of Time Warner, recommends DSL and ISDN lines, talks about the downside of videostreaming, and, most importantly, he’s digitatizing his act.
“[email protected]” is the comedian’s new weekly series on the Web, which debuted yesterday. The pre-recorded show will feature commentary and conversations with guests such as John Irving, Oliver Sacks, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Reeve, George Lucas, Mario Cuomo, Nathan Lane and Eric Idle.
“I’m just working through every friend I have,” he told The Post. “No one’s left saying ‘Boy that was a drag. They like the idea because it’s free-form.'”
It also gives Williams a chance to show a serious side — but not too serious. He’ll go off on riffs with guests but then steer it back to sanity.
But while it’s free-form, it’s not free. “Audible.com,” which says Williams is the first Hollywood star to have a series on the Web, will charge a $39.95 for a year’s subscription to the series — although the first eight weeks are free until May 18.
Williams was drawn to the idea of reaching a large ‘Net audience, who can download the audio files of the series at any time, and listen to them on portable players or on their PCs.
“Years ago, a comedy album at its best could get to 100,000 people,” he said. Now, the Internet is the way for Williams to return to the audio tradition of the comic acts he grew up with — George Carlin, Jonathan Winters, Richard Pryor and the Firesign Theater.
“Without the medication, it was still funny,” Williams jokes about their performances. He explains the listeners come back to any medium, be it radio or TV, because they want to follow the storyline of the characters the comedians have dreamed up.
Such characters will spring to life suddenly in the interviews with his guests. Even during this interview, Williams slips from a serious discussion about his new gig to newly invented characters to punctuate his points.
“It’s fun for me to experiment again. People say I’m visual, but I’ll take that visual energy and funnel it into a sound tradition,” he says.
“You find yourself more free to take a character out there because you can imagine it. You can take an old blues player or anybody, and all of a sudden you find yourself in a studio and see how it will go.”
Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks said it best after his sit-down, Williams explains. “I have no idea what this [show] is and at the end I still don’t know,” Sacks said. “But it’s really interesting.”
Williams wants to keep the atmosphere intimate, and insists that no photos be taken during the audio recordings. He wants his guests to be able show up without makeup, so they can feel freer as well.
“You see an opening and you go for it, and you talk about whatever is on your mind,” he says. “It’s intimate. There’s no sense of an audience.”
Williams became PC-savvy due to his love for computer games, which he’s been playing since the days of the first Atari units. Now he playing The Sims and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.
But he knows he can’t keep up with the hardware. “If you try to stay on top, you go completely insane. You get Pentium envy,” he says.
A voice, a character, is coming. He introduces, “Some poor speed junkie.” Then his voice gets desperate: “I need more speed, I need 800 megahertz.”
Then back to serious conversation. He explains, you don’t need a 800 megahertz unless you’re doing high-end graphics.
Williams thoroughly enjoys the adrenaline rush of game-playing, but also knows all his guests aren’t as PC friendly as he is.
John Irving, for instance, is married to IBM Selectric typewriters. Author Harlan Ellison — who was behind the PC game I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream — went to a software convention and basically told the troops to get a life.
Clearly, Williams looks forward to the broad scope of these conversations. “A women came up to me at the airport, and said, ‘Be zany.’ She wanted me to be bouncing off the walls.
“I said, ‘Lady, I don’t do that all the time.'”
At [email protected], you’ll hear both sides.
You can e-mail Mary at[email protected]