Dana Carvey, then a college student at San Francisco State, had been harboring his own secret dream of becoming a stand-up—one that he felt too introverted to act on—when he happened to catch Robin performing a solo set as part of a comedy show at a Berkeley café called La Salamandra. “The fourth guy up blew the room away, and it was Robin,” Carvey recalled. “It was so free-form, I’d just never seen anything like it. His voice didn’t need amplification. He had kind of a British accent. He was very shy and quiet, until he wasn’t.”
