During the past decade, Robin Williams, the thirty-four-year-old comic actor, who seems to connect with his audiences on some wild, deep level and to make them laugh in a special way, at once loud, true, and happy, has been featured in two television programs (“Mork & Mindy” and the 1977 revival of “Laugh-In”), six movies (“Popeye,” “The World According to Garp,” “The Survivors,” “Moscow on the Hudson,” “The Best of Times,” and the forthcoming “Club Paradise”), two concert performances on videocassette, and two record albums (“Reality . . . What a Concept” and “Throbbing Python of Love”). One kind of performing, however, Williams has been doing non-stop—before, during, and since his television, movie, concert, and recording activities—and that is working out, in unannounced appearances, in small, late-night comedy clubs: in the Comedy Store, in Los Angeles; in Yuk-Yuk’s, in Toronto; in the Second City, in Chicago; in the Holy City Zoo, in San Francisco; in Catch a Rising Star, in New York; and in others that have become established since the early nineteen-seventies in dozens of cities in the United States. Well before flying west to be an Oscar host extraordinaire, Williams was in New York, helping to organize last week’s “Comic Relief” cable-television show—a benefit to raise money for the nation’s homeless—and we tagged along with him for a while as he embarked on his midnight-and-after workouts.

When we met Williams, he had been sitting for four hours at the Public Theatre watching “Hamlet,” and he emerged looking wilted and done in. He is a stocky, mild-seeming man with a rubbery face and body, which we were accustomed to seeing, in performance, go in seconds from Barry Fitzgerald to William F. Buckley, Jr., and on to Jerry Falwell, to Jesse Jackson, to Nadia Comaneci, and to God knows who or what else—always, in his inimitable way, simultaneously sharp and gentle. Now, wearing baggy brown pants tight at the ankles, black hiking boots, and a yellow rain jacket, he was calm and subdued. He expressed admiration for Kevin Kline as Hamlet and for Harriet Harris as Ophelia, noting that both actors were, like him, alumni of the Juilliard Theatre Center. He said that Jeff Weiss, a first-timer in a legitimate production, who had taken the roles of the Ghost, the Player King, and Osric, the unctuous courtier, was impressive. Then, in the taxi heading for Catch a Rising Star (First Avenue near Seventy-seventh), Williams suddenly, quietly, became, successively, a Yiddish-accented Hamlet lamenting Yorick “buried in treyf ”; an insane Hamlet in a mental institution playing all the parts in the play; a “Hamlet” featuring George Jessel as the Ghost; a Woody Allen Hamlet, sounding exactly like Woody Allen saying “I don’t know whether I should avenge him or honor him”; a Jack Nicholson Hamlet, sounding exactly like Jack Nicholson saying “To be or not to bleeping be . . . ”

Then Williams retreated into his own calm, and we spent the rest of the taxi ride having him give us a quick refresher course in his history: Born in Chicago, an only child, his father an automobile-company vice-president (“He looks like a British Army officer”), who retired and moved the family to Marin County, outside San Francisco, and his mother a “very funny” prankster and cutup, originally from the South, who loves to tell jokes. “I was good in languages and thought I’d go into the Foreign Service, or something like that,” Williams told us. “In high school, I was heavily into cross-country running, which I loved, and wrestling, which gave me a chance to do some damage. I went to one of the Claremont Colleges, where I took courses in political science and economics and failed them. After the first year, I left Claremont and went to the College of Marin, near home, which had an amazing Drama Department, with teachers who told me about Juilliard. I auditioned for Juilliard, got a full scholarship, and stayed three years, doing Shakespeare and Strindberg. Back home, I started going nightly to a coffeehouse called the Intersection, on Union Street in San Francisco. During the day, I worked in an ice-cream parlor. One night, at the coffeehouse, for no reason at all, I got up and imitated a quarterback high on LSD. It felt great. This was fun. No one was telling me what to do. I liked the freedom.”

By the time we arrived at Catch a Rising Star, it was packed: standees three deep at the bar in front; an audience of about a hundred and fifty in the back room, seated at little tables, having drinks, facing a small platform with a standing mike. On the wall behind the platform were signs saying “BREAK A LEG” and “MONOGRAM PICTURES CORP. ENTRANCE,” and nearby was a montage painting of famous comedians—Eddie Cantor, Charlie Chaplin, Milton Berle, and Abbott and Costello. On the platform, a young m.c.—short, chubby, with dark curly hair, and wearing a long-sleeved sports shirt over a T-shirt—was getting ready laughs with routine questions of and comments on the audience, which consisted mostly of young singles, young couples, foursomes of young women, threesomes of young men. The m.c. left after introducing his replacement, a tall, rangy man with thinning hair who wore jeans and a red sweater. The replacement worked for about fifteen minutes, getting dutiful laughs by telling “family” jokes: “My mother had four children. I was the only vertebrate one,” and “We have a dog. He’s half retriever, half vulture. He’s been circling Grandma.”

The chubby m.c. returned and announced that Robin Williams was there, and the place went bananas. Screams, yells, whistles, shrieks, cheers, and tremendous applause. Williams took the mike. He said, speaking as an Oscar recipient, “Thank you for making this possible. [As a snobbish theatregoer] As long as I have my glasses on, the world is mine. I just went to see ‘Hamlet.’ I want to see Hamlet played by Sly Stallone. [As Stallone] ‘To be or what?’ [As himself] Maybe he and Schwarzenegger can do a movie together. [As Schwarzenegger] With subtitles in English.”