“I don’t like ‘aww,’” he told me, referring to the audience’s worried expressions. “I just want to laugh. ‘Aww’ annoys me. ‘Aww’ grates on my spirits.”
Robinson doesn’t just brag. He’s worried enough about getting cheap approval for making jokes intended to alienate, he said. If an audience member doesn’t laugh, he points the cane at them and says, “Don’t you like black handicapped people?” Once a woman responded by bursting into tears. The club paid for her ticket.
With the changes in his movement and speech, Robinson’s stand-up has a new gravitas and rhythm. After extensive speech therapy, he can tell jokes but has to work harder to be understood. “Everything has to be more precise now,” he said, comparing his turn to that of an athletic quarterback who can get out of trouble by becoming a small pass rusher. “Everything matters. I can’t depend on movement.”
Wanda Sykes, an old friend from before they moved to New York around the same time, took him on tour with her when he returned to the stage for the first time in 2022. She said via email that his material had become more personal: “It opened up.”
Some of his funniest lines are brief, like when he asks God why he let these blows happen to him. He stops, gives a look that suggests a life of casual sin, and says, “Oh yeah.”
After his second stroke, which was much more debilitating than the first, Robinson briefly thought that he should give up acting and become a comedy writer. Chris Rock hired him to help with his recent special. But Robinson missed being on stage, hanging out with comics and, above all, “making an impression,” which, it’s fair to say, is his love language.