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Eulogies

Some of the most moving and brilliant speeches ever made occur at funerals. Please upload the eulogy for your loved one using the form below.

For Robin Williams: 'This guy comes in and we're like a morning dew, he comes in like a hurricane', by David Letterman - 2014

June 22, 2020

Well, thank you ladies and gentlemen. Thank you.
I guess like a lot of us, most of us, I've been thinking about Robin Williams, I believe we found out a week ago that he had died. Many things come to mind in a situation like this. And of course, more questions are raised than can possibly be answered, but I started reflecting about it.
I knew Robin Williams for 38 years. 38 years, which in and of itself is crazy. How time...
I met him at The Comedy Store. He and I were kids along... It was myself and Jay Leno and Tom Dreesen and Tim Thomason and Johnny Dark and Elayne Boosler and on and on and Jimmy Walker. We were all out there at The Comedy Store and we wanted to make people laugh. We wanted to get on The Tonight Show. We wanted something because we all felt that we're funny. In those days, we were working for free drinks. Some were working for more free drinks than others, but.
So what you would do is you would go on stage and then you do your little skits and then you would come off stage. If there was a new guy coming on, you'd want to stick around and make fun of the new guy.

Paul: Sure.

David Letterman: Because we were all worried that, "Oh, somebody else is coming in who's really funny." And then we'll have to go back, in my case, to Indiana.

Paul: Yes.

David Letterman: I can remember the night my friend, George Miller and I, who was a very funny comic and was on this show many times, we were at The Comedy Store and they introduce Robin Williams. For some reason in the beginning, he was introduced as being from Scotland. They said he was Scottish.

Paul: I see
.
David Letterman: Now we're stumped. We don't know. There's a Scottish guy, really, coming to the United States? So we were feeling pretty smug about our position right away, because it's going to be haggis and that kind of crap. So we're relaxed. We're ready to go. All of a sudden, he comes up on stage and you know what it is. It's like nothing we had ever seen before. Nothing we had ever imagined before. We go home at night and are writing our little jokes about stuff. And this guy comes in and we're like a morning dew, he comes in like a hurricane.

Now, the longer he's onstage, the worse we feel about ourselves because it's not stopping. And then he finishes and I thought, "Oh, that's it. They're going to have to put an end to show business because what can happen after this?" And then we get to see this night after night after night. We didn't approach him because we were afraid of him. Honest to God. You thought, "Holy crap, there goes my chance at show business because of this guy from Scotland."

And then like a shot out of a cannon, he goes and he's on the Happy Days show. And then from the Happy Days show, he gets to be on Mork & Mindy. Now, there's some structure to his life. He's not at The Comedy Store every night because he's got an actual job. So the rest of us can pretend that it never happened. But yet, then he goes from Mork & Mindy and then he starts to making movie after movie after movie. He's nominated four times for an Academy Award. It wasn't really until Paul and I started the NBC version of this show, which by the way, is still running in Mexico.

Paul: It is.

David Letterman: Very popular. But it wasn't until then that I sort of got to really know Robin Williams, because he would come on to promote movies or concerts or whatever he was talking about. He was always so gracious. We would talk about the old times and never did he act like, "Oh, I knew you guys were scared because I was so good." It was just a pleasure to know the guy. He was a gentleman and delightful. Even in the old days, he was kind enough to ask me to appear on his Mork & Mindy show. Now, this is a double edged sword because he did it only because he was trying to help other fledgling, starting out comics.

Paul: Make sense.

David Letterman: Right. The other side of the sword is I had no business being on that show. I have no business being on this show. But he was nice. He gave me a job. So in those days, jobs were hard to come by. And there I was, and I was on Mork & Mindy. I can remember between the dress rehearsal and the actual taping of the show, the director of the program, Howard, Howard, Howard Shore-

Paul: Howard Storm.

David Letterman: Storm. Howard Storm comes up to me and he says, "Well, you've been trying all week." He says, "This is your last chance."
So even to the detriment of the show, Robin was kind enough to invite me to come on because he thought, "Why can't I spread this around and have some of my friends sharing my success," which is exactly what he did. He then was on our show, the show, in the old show, a total of nearly 50 times.

Paul: Total of 50 times?

David Letterman: 50 times. 50 times. Two things would happen because Robin was on the program. One, I didn't have to do anything. All I had to do was sit here and watch the machine. And two, people would watch. If they knew Robin was on the show, the viewership would go up because they wanted to see Robin. Believe me, that wasn't just true of television. I believe that was true of the kind of guy he was. People were drawn to him because of this electricity. This, whatever it was that he radiated that propelled him and powered him.

And then he came on when I came back after my heart surgery, Robin was nice enough to come on that night. And it was very, very funny and very, very appropriate. Here's a picture that I will now cherish even more than I had previously. There are four people right there. Two of which wildly funny, insanely funny, two are not.

The handsome woman there is Mitzi Shore. She owned The Comedy Store. We all, the three of us, worked there. I think Robin and I, it'd be safe to say, we started there. Richard Pryor was already Richard Pryor, but he would work there. The guy in the middle, I trimmed hedges.

Paul: Yeah. Oh, well.

David Letterman: So we would like to... We put together a segment of Robin Williams appearances. Moreover, more than anything, it will make you laugh. Really, that's what we should take from this is he could make you laugh under any circumstances. Here he is on our show.

[Clips]


God bless you, my friend.
Well, what I will add here is beyond being a very talented man and a good friend and a gentlemen, I'm sorry. Like everybody else, I had no idea that the man was in pain, that the man was suffering. But what a guy. Robin Williams. We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.


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In PUBLIC FIGURE D Tags DAVID LETTERMAN, THE LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN, TRANSCRIPT, ROBIN WILLIAMS, EULOGY, TRIBUTE, TELEVISION EULOGY, DEPRESSION, SUICIDE, FRIEND, COMEIDANS, THE COMEDY STORE, RICHARD PRYOR, MORK & MINDY, HAPPY DAYS
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for Robert Ferguson: 'During the wake we tell favourite stories about the person that’s passed and it’s not always very flattering for the person, either', by Craig Ferguson - 2005

April 19, 2016

30 January 2006, aired on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, LA, California, USA

My father was 75 years old and he lived a very full life. He did everything that he set out to do. Where I come from, in the Celtic tradition it’s kind of a wake where we talk about the person’s life, there’s a lot of drinking usually, but of course I won’t be taking part in that. I think others may get involved in that for obvious reasons.

During the wake we tell favorite stories about the person that’s passed and it’s not always very flattering for the person, either. It’s kind of a roast sometimes. It’s a celebration of a human being with faults and quirks and all the idiosyncrasies that go with being a person and my father was certainly that.

My father was born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1930 which was a source of great pride for his Irish Catholic mother and some consternation for his Scottish Protestant father. He grew up from a poor background. He grew up in Glasgow in Scotland during World War II. Glasgow was bombed heavily during the war and all of the kids were evacuated out of the cities and put to work on the farms in the countryside to escape the German bombing.

It was supposed to be some kind of an idyllic reprieve, but my father’s experience was more like a Dicksonian workhouse. It didn’t work out well for him. It was very tough for him. He didn’t talk about it much. In the six years that he was there it was just awful. He had a very tough childhood.

From where he started to where he ended up with the journey so vast and incredible it’s too much for me to hope to emulate…”

My father spent two years in the British army stationed in Germany. He worked in the post office in Scotland for 44 years. He started as a telegram boy delivering telegrams on the Norton ex-army base where you change the gear by taking your hands off the handlebars, called the suicide shift.

They were too poor to emulate Marlon Brando in the Wild One with the silk scarf, so they used to wear white tea towels around their necks to look like Americans.

I have lived in America for eleven years and I have never seen anyone wearing a white tea towel around their necks. But I’m still looking.


By the time my dad retired, he had about 600 men working for him at the Edinburgh post office in the capital of Scotland. He was a chief inspector and he was the boss and he went all the way up. He did it through hard work.

He was a Scottish nationalist, my father. He believed in an independent Scotland. He also believed in this place. He believed in America and in the opportunity it offered. My father introduced me to America literally. He brought me here when I was 13. We used to get cheap fares.


Cheap air fares from Freddy Laker and I think it was $100 or something and we visited my father’s brother, my Uncle James, who had moved to Long Island. I talked often about the summer I spent there as a teenager as a 13 year old.

My father said, “Where did you get the idea I had the whole summer off work? We were there for three weeks.”

But in my mind it was a life-changing experience. I fell in love with American then. I decided then to come back.

My father believed in hard work and I believe that’s how my father expressed love. There is something spiritual in hard work. I think spirituality isn’t all about aromatherapy and scented candles. I think for my dad it was about getting up early and working hard and making a better life for his kids. And that’s what this man did.

Every Christmas at the post office, there’s something called the pressure. Where the mail starts to build up and there’s more and more mail and the postal workers were working 12 hour shifts all the time. It was crazy the amount of work they were doing. Now I think they call it going postal.

He worked his ass off the entire month of December. But every Christmas morning, he woke up with me and my brother and my sister and helped put the presents together. He must have been blooming tired. But he did it and he never mentioned how tired he was.

But I think he must have been tired.

My father was in charge of postal workers. Postal workers in Glascow – they are tough men. These are not guys who say “I am lactose intolerant. Can we get soy in the cafeteria?” They weren’t guys like that. He was a big man, my father. And he had a buzz cut, my father. It made him look like he had a scrubbing brush up here. And that was his nickname; they called him “Big Scrubber,” and the postal workers used to me and say, “You’re Big Scrubbers boy,” and I would say, “I’m Little Scrubber. Wee scrubber.” But I could never really live up to that.

When I was broke, my dad gave me a job as a temporary worker in the post office in December. It was back when I was still drinking and I got drunk and I was an hour late for work and my father was the boss and I showed up at 5 am and not 4 am. Another worker saw me and said, “Your father knows you’re late and he’s got a special assignment for you.” And what he did was send me to the Glascow airport to load mailbags onto the planes in December. I have never been so cold in my life. And remember Glascow is on the same latitude as Moscow and I had an incredible hangover and I was late because I’d been drunk, but I was never late for work again, I’ll tell you that.

My father was a great whistler. I don’t know if that’s important, but I remember it. He could do that vibrato thing. It was fantastic.

And he loved the Road Runner cartoons. I’ve said that here before. They really made him laugh. I know, I don’t get it, either, but he loved them.

He also loved the Tweety Bird and Sylvester. He loved how stupid Sylvester was. “That cat’s so stupid; the bird wins all the time.” I loved watching television with my dad. He had very unique viewing habits…When I was watching television with him, I would sit in front of him and he would sit behind me and he would put his hand on my head and I loved that. And he did it last week in the hospital. Probably the first time in 25 years or something and from his bed, he put his hand on my head.

It was amazing. It was great. He was a man of few words, my dad. I get my talking from my mother’s side of the family. But I was never in any doubt that he loved me. He wasn’t from a generation of people who said, “Son, we need to talk about our feelings. Let’s hug.” My dad would just say, “Hey,” but you knew what he meant when he said it. And the relationship that I had…I have with my father is not unlike the relationship I have with my home country – with Scotland. I complain about it. I grumble about it. I can be mean about it sometimes, but I love it beyond reason. It’s where I’m from. It’s what I am.

Last week you know, we were cleaning out some stuff in his room so we could make him more comfortable when he got out of the hospital and I found some stuff – a letter of commendation from his bosses at the post office. This letter had been written in 1961. It had been in his pouch since 1961. A fight had broken out in the mail trains where he used to work and he stopped it. It was a terrible incident and people were very grateful he had stopped it and the incident was dated September 1961 and the letter was in October 1961. I was born in May 1962, so the letter was around the time I was conceived and I mentioned that to my father in the hospital last week and said “That was a big month,” and he said, “Hey.”

He was a strong man, my dad and we didn’t always get along. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve got some opinions about stuff and you know, we got it straight years ago. But when I was a teenager, well, the night after my sister’s wedding, we got into a fight. Well, not really a fight, he said that if I didn’t stop being a jerk, he’d hit me and I ran away.

But I want to tell you about who he was. When I went into rehab, it was in the South of England and my parents took the bus from Scotland to England to this rehab and it was a very alien environment for them and they came and they sat in this room and the counselor was there and we were going to have the family talk and my father said, “Just before we start, everybody, I want to say something. Craig, I am not going to stop drinking.”

I said, “Alright. You don’t need to stop drinking. It’s about me stopping drinking.”

I want to tell you about something that happened last week. My father had a mantra. He had this thing he always used to say. When I was going into show business, my father was always telling me to get a trade so I’d have something to fall back on. My father wasn’t like that. He’d always say, “Do a job that you love. Job satisfaction. As long as you have job satisfaction, you can be anything you want to be. And he kept repeating it and my brother and I would tease him about it. “Job satisfaction, You can be anything you want to be.”

And so we’re in the hospital last week and my father was dying and he knew he was dying. And my son was there with me. He is 4 ½ and he drew a picture for my dad of some trees and a beautiful day and we put it on the wall and he sang to my dad, “Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer,” which you know, everyone wants to hear when they’re in pain and it’s the middle of January. And my son sang him the whole thing. And he got through that. And then my son said, “Oh, I’ve got a great idea.” He went underneath my dad’s hospital bed and he said, “I am going to sing a song and you can’t see me.” For some reason he thought that would be very funny. Maybe I’ll try it here one night.

And he sang a song he had picked up from on the kid’s albums that come out. We were sitting there with my dad and the great drama of the deathbed and my son sang, “You can be anything you want to be. You can be…” Even in the pain, I saw that my dad had a smile that came across his face and it was fantastic.

I miss him. You didn’t know him and that’s your loss. He was a great man. And it’s hard to say goodbye to people. It’s hard to say goodbye to parents. When I left my dad, we got it straight before he died. I couldn’t speak, so a gesture came to me that I think worked and I think he knew it as well. I punched my chest and I threw him my heart. Good night, dad.

 

Source: https://www.funeralwise.com/plan/eulogy/fe...

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In SUBMITTED 2 Tags TELEVISION EULOGY, CRAIG FERGUSON, ROBERT FERGUSON, FATHER, TV HOST, SON
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