Rumors that Robin Williams stole jokes have persisted for decades, and his fellow comedians have continued to share stories about his alleged theft as the years have gone by. However, unlike Carlos Mencia and Denis Leary, who’ve been accused of the same thing, side-by-side videos showing the specific jokes Williams is supposed to have stolen have yet to make the rounds. That, of course, doesn’t make the accusations untrue.
It’s hard to argue with people who were working the same clubs as Williams back in the day. Friday star John Witherspoon once suggested that the reason Williams was so funny was that he was taking everybody’s best material. More recently, Damon Wayans told Shannon Sharpe that Williams would actually pay comedians when put on the spot about using their jokes. “‘Cause he knew. Robin was all stream of [consciousness], and he would steal material. He was known. Comedians would go, ‘I’m not going on ‘cause Robin’s here.’”
In a 2010 episode of his WTF podcast, Marc Maron asked Williams about the stealing issue, and the comedian replied by telling him, “In the old days, if you hang out in comedy clubs, [which] I was doing almost 24/7, you hear things. And then, if you’re improvising, all of a sudden you’re repeating, going, ‘Oh, s–t!’” Williams went on to explain that he eventually had to stop spending so much time at clubs to avoid having that happen.
But whether he owned up to it or not, people weren’t happy about it. David Brenner reportedly got so fed up with Williams’s stealing that he called up his agent and said, “Tell Robin if he ever takes one more line from me, I’ll rip his leg off and shove it up his a–!” Tom Dreesen was also rumored to have angrily confronted Williams and thrown him up against a wall, but that appears to have been greatly exaggerated.
Which brings us to another legend that keeps popping up from time to time. Bill Maher even repeated this one on his Club Random podcast in 2024. The Real Time host recalled that Williams “might’ve had a tendency once in a while, because he was on Mork and Mindy, to hear something at the Comedy Store, and perhaps it involuntarily got into the back of his head, and then it would appear on Mork and Mindy. And the story was that Tim Thomerson just walked into the Comedy Store one night and punched him in the face.”
There’s at least one comedian who says that didn’t happen, however, and that’s Tim Thomerson. This is according to Ritch Shydner, who wrote and starred in the 2010 documentary I Am Comic. As he tells it, the legend has grown significantly over the years, with people adding things about Thomerson throwing Williams down a flight of stairs and even off of a building for stealing his line, “Reality…what a concept.” But although they make for some pretty entertaining stories, Shydner maintains that they’re all equally fictional.
At press time, there’s no real evidence that Williams was ever attacked by Thomerson, though something tells us this won’t be the last time we hear about it.
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