Robin Williams has only been back in the saddle for a few weeks — it was just in late September that he resumed the stand-up tour that was interrupted in the spring when he had to have heart surgery — but it didn’t take long for him to rediscover his “A” game.

In his stand-up act, Williams likes to connect with audiences by riffing on local topics and personalities — so, at one of his first shows after the tour resumed, in South Bend, Ind. (the home of the University of Notre Dame), he shuffled onstage, his back hunched over, and screamed, “Sanctuary!!!!” Then, after a pause, he stood upright, and quipped, “Oh, wrong Notre Dame.”

He also made jokes about Notre Dame’s “Touchdown Jesus,” and about Charlie Weis, the Fighting Irish football coach. So, those who are going to Williams’ Hill Auditorium show on Friday should just maybe anticipate some bits about Rich Rodriguez and U-M football players spending too much time practicing — or, perhaps, too little.

And, given that Williams grew up in Bloomfield Hills, the son of a high-level Ford Motor Company executive, it’s likely we’ll also hear a few riffs on the Detroit automakers, their upper management and their (often unfairly) beleaguered products.

When Williams launched his ’09 stand-up tour — this one is titled “Weapons of Self-Destruction” — it was his first such endeavor since 2003. He’s been busy in the interim making movies. And when he chose the phrase “Self-Destruction,” he probably wasn’t counting on it hitting so close to home. In March, while performing in Florida, Williams suffered from shortness of breath, and learned he had a serious heart problem.

He ended up undergoing a procedure to replace his aortic valve, repair his mitral valve and correct his irregular heartbeat. A couple of months later, he was on David Letterman’s show, riffing that he and Dave were now ‘brotherhood of the zipper-chests.” (Letterman had quintuple bypass surgery in 2000.)

Robin Williams and David Letterman talk "heart to heart":

Robin Williams performs at Hill Auditorium on Friday.

Given how hyper and wildly physical Williams has always been onstage — not to mention on talk shows — some of us who’ve been watching him push the limits for 25 years have thought, “You know, one of these days, this guy is going to blow a gasket.” Of course, that was just a dark-humored quip. But before the ’09 tour began, he told Rolling Stone that he agreed with Chris Rock’s assessment that doing stand-up “is like getting in the ring again. It’s a fix…..and occasionally, when we’ll do 8,000-seat theaters, it’s almost too much. It’s a bit like an OD: ‘Whoooaaa, that’s a lot of energy.”

No guff. Williams, now 58, admitted to RS that, onstage, “sometimes I’ll be out of breath, going, ‘Oh, I’m old — I better stop for a moment.’” And this was before his heart problem.

In the years since Williams’ last stand-up tour, he’s been through some stressful situations — a highly publicized divorce and equally-high-profile relapse into substance abuse, after having been clean for many years. But, Williams is fearlessly self-immolating, so he’s also been making jokes about those travails at his own expense.

Some of the other topics he’s lampooned in his current stand-up act are the bailout of Wall Street charlatans and connivers, Dick Cheney (who he depicts as Gollum from “Lord of the Rings”), swimmer Michael Phelps’ “bong problem,” the race-relations implications of Barack Obama winning the presidency and the bottomless well of comedy that is Sarah Palin.

And even though George Bush has been out of office for eight months, he continues to be reliable comic fodder. In one bit, Williams has described Bush’s friendship with former British prime minister as a “United Nations ‘Rain Man,’” — with Bush, of course, in the Dustin Hoffman role, as Williams unspooled an imagined dialogue between the two.

And judging by reviews of some of his recent shows, Williams still does not flinch from “working blue,” to borrow an old phrase — that is, making graphic sexual jokes that cannot be repeated in a family-friendly publication.

Although some Williams fans and critics (including this one) believe that he’s funnier in his stand-up act than in his movies, he’s definitely devoted more of his time and energies to acting over the last 15 years — starring in films like “The Birdcage,” “Jumanji,” “Good Will Hunting,” “One Hour Photo,” “Bicentennial Man,” “Patch Adams,” “Insomnia,” “Man of the Year,” “RV” and the “Night at the Museum” movies.

His most recent film was “World’s Greatest Dad,” a very black comedy directed by comic/actor/director Bobcat Goldthwait, in which Williams portrayed a failed novelist and unpopular poetry teacher who was such a loser that his girlfriend didn’t want anyone to know they were dating. His character also endured constant verbal abuse from an obnoxious teenaged son. Then, the film took a dark turn when Williams’ character experienced a personal tragedy.

In one scene, Williams appeared totally naked. But the famously hirsute Williams shaved his body hair for the scene. “I shaved because, if you don’t, it’s, like, animal-rights issues,” cracked Williams to the Los Angeles Times when the film was released. “I did a nude scene in ‘Fisher King’. It was in Central Park, and I was a homeless guy, and I was covered in dirt and really hairy, and it was like, ‘Is this Bigfoot?’”

In this scene from "World's Greatest Dad," Williams talks to his students about poetry:

Of course, Williams’ first big break was his role as the bizarrely funny alien in the ‘70s sitcom “Mork & Mindy.” When that show was canceled, Williams took it hard at first, angry about the network having interfered so much with pandering, implausible storylines that the show got less and less funny, leading to lower and lower ratings.

But, it was getting back to stand-up that proved to be his “salvation,” Williams recently told Backstage magazine. And it also kept him from being typecast after having been so closely associated with the Mork role: “I could go onstage and be nasty and funny and it was a release,” he said. “People could see me in a different light.”

So, fast-forward a few decades, and Williams is again back on the stage, letting people see him in a different light. And he says this is a good time to be doing stand-up again, in the wake of the litany of Bush-administration disasters.

“You’ve kind of been abused after the last eight years,” he told the Times in August, describing his current comic mind-set. “So you try to find the comedy in coming out of this weird, almost hypnotic state (the country has been in).

“And the rest of the world is dealing with us differently again, going: ‘Welcome back….Is the crazy guy gone?’ Yes. ‘Do you still have other crazies?’ Yes, but she just retired as governor.” Take that, Palin.

PREVIEW Robin Williams Who: Superstar comic/actor. What: Stand-up comedy tour, recently resumed after being interrupted in the spring when Williams needed heart surgery. Where: Hill Auditorium, 825 S. University When: Friday, 8:00 p.m. Tickets: $65, $75, $95 Details: (734) 763-8587 / http://www.livenation.com/edp/eventId/401816

Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music and comedy for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.