"I saw what I thought was one of the floats, but it was actually your offensive coordinator Charlie Weis taking a mid-afternoon nap," McHale said. He wise-cracked about offensive coordinator Charlie Weis. When Joel McHale performed in 2011, the students and alumni had to endure his jokes about the lackluster performance by the Gator football team at what is meant to be a pep rally. When he played Growl in 2009, Dana Carvey acknowledged the difference between his two audiences, saying it was a challenge to play for both "horny, drunken students and the really nice parents who spent a fortune sending them to college." Over the decades, Gator Growl has booked a grab bag of both A-listers like Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano and Jay Leno, as well as edgier, less mainstream and sometimes unpredictable talent like Mitch Hedberg and Dave Chappelle. The following year, Bill Cosby pleased both young and old and kept it clean. The year after Williams, they booked Bob Hope, who was booed by the students when he stopped the show to tape a portion of it for his own TV special. Organizers have attempted to control that edginess to some degree over the years. "It's hard to predict what a professional entertainer will do." "Of course, I've always been biased in favor of the students, and always wanted what the students wanted to have," he said. "He had never performed for a crowd as large as Gator Growl."Īrt Sandeen, vice president for Student Affairs at the time of Williams' Growl appearance, said he remembers "various people expressing their strong views about the content of Gator Growl," and he himself said he was shocked by the performance, although he didn't think it would be as shocking to him today. They went to a club called Islands, ran around the Sovereign restaurant for an hour and wound up at Teebagy's house, where they hung out until dawn. "He wanted to see the town, so we took him around," Sides recalled. "It caused an uproar but also caused a celebration for the younger people," said Barry Sides, a Gainesville musician who was friends with local promoter Albert Teebagy and was among a handful of people who got to hang out with Williams afterward. UF football coach Will Muschamp - a preteen living in Gainesville at the time - said he learned a lot of colorful language watching Williams headline Growl that night.Īs hilarious as Williams was to the students, his ribald performance had organizers and alumni seeing blue, kicking off decades of discomfort and squeamishness over future comedy acts. The performance was also noted for Williams' oft-repeated references to a singular part of his anatomy, which he dubbed "Mr. His mind was a high-speed computer of comedy." He was making up jokes as the show went on, based on what he saw and heard. "I saw Robin Williams at Gator Growl in 1982. Gaffey, a UF alumnus and longtime newspaper reporter and editor, recalled on Facebook. "When I was at UF, you couldn't get in the dorm lounges on nights when ‘Mork and Mindy' was on," Michael T. Williams was at the peak of his rainbow-suspender-wearing popularity, "Mork & Mindy" was in its fourth and final season, and the "The World According to Garp" with Williams playing the lead role of T.S. The shocking news of Robin Williams' suicide has brought back memories for many University of Florida alumni of a certain age of Williams' performance at Gator Growl in 1982.
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