A few days after Robin Williams' death last August, a video editor named Daniel Pastel uploaded this early '80s footage of Williams joking, riffing, doing voices, and generally just being Robin Williams with Mork and Mindy director Howard Storm.

The video is a promo for Storm's commercial work, the pitch being that if he could direct the human typhoon that was Robin Williams, he could direct anything. And the joke being that no one could really direct Robin Williams. He just had to manically work everything out before he nailed the take.

"Working with him was just amazing. The trick I found with Robin was that you could not sit on him," Storm said in an interview for the Archive of American Television, "You had to let him rehearse and do everything he wanted to do and get it out of his system, and then you could peel away."

Here's Williams doing everything he wanted, with nothing peeled away.

[h/t Reddit]