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    The Michael Richards Rehabilitation Tour Is in Full Swing

    EntertainmentHollywood
    By Runfyers
    The Michael Richards Rehabilitation Tour Is in Full Swing

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    Once upon a time Michael Richards was only best known as the nutty neighbor Cosmo Kramer on Seinfeld. That all changed in November of 2006, when he launched into a racist rant on the stage of the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. The backlash was swift, and despite a public apology delivered on Late Night with David Letterman, Richards’ career has been dead in the water ever since. But now he’s got a new book out, and he’s doing a series of media appearances ostensibly to promote it but really to test the waters and see if America is willing to forgive his racist outburst 18 years later and allow him to return to some level of public fame once again. And the press and the media are happy to help (note the use of passive voice in the above tweet).

    What happened?

    Before something “happened” to Richards, he was of course beloved by America for his role as the pratfalling, scheming oddball Kramer on Jerry Seinfeld’s hit sitcom. Richards was a regular cast member from the show’s first episode, and largely due to his gift for physical comedy and his performance as the eccentric Kramer, the character quickly became a fan favorite. However, upon Seinfeld‘s run ending in 1998, Richards seemed unable to parlay the goodwill the Kramer character had engendered into further success; a sitcom, The Michael Richards Show, designed as a post-Seinfeld star vehicle for him, cast Richards as an inept private detective. It only lasted a few weeks before being unceremoniously canceled. It was apparently an unmitigated disaster for Richards’ career, as IMDb has no roles at all listed for him over the next several years.

    Unable to get TV or film work, Richards turned to stand-up to make a living (something that comedian friends of his later said he had little experience of), which is what he was doing on November 17, 2006. It was supposed to be just another Friday night at the Hollywood Laugh Factory, one of a franchise of stand up venues located throughout the US. However, according to reports from audience members, Richards took exception at a table of patrons who were apparently having a vocal conversation and being loud enough to disturb his performance. He reportedly said, “Look at the stupid Mexicans and blacks being loud up there.” One audience member retorted that he didn’t think Richards was funny, which appeared to provoke the below outburst from Richards:

    [I rewatched it so you don`t have to]* He starts by screaming “Shut up! Fifty years ago we’d have had you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass!”
    * He repeats the phrase “You can talk, you can talk, you can talk” which some have interpreted as a reference to the Simpsons parody of Planet of the Apes
    * He then screams “Throw his ass out! He’s a n****r!”
    * He calls the audience member the N-word several more times
    * Audience members start to boo and catcall him
    * He mocks them, saying “Ooooh, ooooh…this shocks you? This shocks you?”
    * An audience member or multiple members repeat the phrase “That was uncalled for”
    * Richards screams that it’s “uncalled for you to interrupt my ass, you cheap motherfucker!”
    * Finally talking in a normal voice, he claims he’s about to be arrested for calling a black man the N-word
    * But he starts screaming again and using the N-word when an audience calls him a “cracker-ass motherfucker”
    * An audience member calls him a “reject,” mocking him for his lack of post-Seinfeld success
    * Richards appears to mockingly(?) agree, saying “you got me there, you’re absolutely right. I’m just a wash up”
    * At this point many members of the audience can be seen getting up and leaving
    * The back-and-forth with the audience continues for a bit, with Richards saying “That’s what happens when you interrupt the white man!”
    * He paces back and forth a bit more, saying “You see? There’s still those words, those words, those words…” then unceremoniously leaves the stage
    * After a few moments, somebody else comes on stage and apologizes

    It’s worth noting that Richards didn’t just hurl racist slurs; he actively gloried in America’s past of white supremacy and openly yearned for a time when he could have had his critics lynched for speaking out against him, as well as acting like his whiteness gives him carte blance (no pun intended) to speak uninterrupted. Everything about that clip betrays a man who feels like he’s been disrespected by his inferiors and has free rein to react however he feels.

    It instantly ignited a firestorm in the media. Fellow comedian Paul Rodriguez told CNN, “Once the word comes out of your mouth and you don’t happen to be African-American, then you have a whole lot of explaining.” One publicist said “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life…I think it’s a career ruiner for him.” Sinbad, who was actually at attendance in Richards’ performance, just said he “went crazy.” Other media outlets were similarly scathing. (Incidentally, “Kramer Loses His Damn Mind” may just win the prize for all-time great ONTD post title). In a way, it was almost serendipitous: TMZ and YouTube were both in their infancy, and the sudden virality of Richards’ video set the tone for how future celebrity scandals would play out, with the raw footage spreading all over the internet before the major media outlets could even turn around. Nobody was able to spin this or excuse it. Not that someone didn’t try; Seinfeld himself appeared on Late Show with David Letterman the following Monday, and midway through his segment, Letterman brought up the Richards incident, at which point Seinfeld announced that Richards was available by satellite to appear on the show and make an apology. It turned out to be a fiasco:

    [If you can`t deal with the 2ndhand embarrassment]*The clip starts with Letterman asking Seinfeld for his reaction to Richards’ explosion. Letterman mentions that “audiences were frightened” at Richards’ stand-up performances that he’d seen in the past, but that “it was all in good fun”
    * Seinfeld says Richards is “upset” and “mystified” about the racist shit he said on stage and calls it “just one of those awful, awful things”, then announces that Richards is available to appear by satellite
    * Richards appears onscreen, Letterman asks how he is: “I’m not doing too good”
    * Richards says “I lost my temper on stage” after being heckled and “went into a rage”
    * He says he said “some pretty nasty things to some Afro-Americans [sic]”
    * At this point audible laughter is heard from the audience; Seinfeld weakly admonishes them: “Stop laughing. It’s not funny”
    * Letterman asks Richards if he was being heckled or just having people talking loudly during his set, and Richards says “that was going on too.”
    * What follows next is the longest five seconds in Michael Richards’ life, as he sits there silently with a hunted look in his eyes until the audience breaks up laughing (I feel like Letterman knew what he was doing here)
    * Now Richards looks even more uncomfortable, saying that he’s “not sure [Letterman’s show] is where I should be addressing the situation”
    * He says he heard Letterman made jokes about the incident and says “that’s ok” but that “I’m really busted up over this”
    * He says he’s “very, very sorry” to “the blacks, the Hispanics, the whites”
    * He expresses concern that his racist rant will lead to a “black-white conflict” and muses on “how blacks [sic] feel about Katrina”, i.e. the 2006 hurricane that devastated low-income neighborhoods in New Orleans and neighboring areas
    * He says he’s going to get to “the forcefield of this hostility”
    * Letterman asks Richards how he would have reacted if the “people doing the heckling” had been “white or Caucasian”; Richards says “I’m a performer; I push the envelope, I work in a very uncontrolled manner on stage”
    * Richards then stammers and stutters for a good thirty seconds before saying “I’m not a racist, that’s what’s so insane about this”
    * At this point Richards is visibly drowning; Letterman tries to throw him a lifeline, asking him if screaming racial slurs had been his attempt to “defuse the situation or make it lighter than it was.” Richards agrees with this, saying he “tried to jiu-jitsu that” but “it didn’t work out”
    * Letterman asks if Richards tried to apologize to the audience members that night, Richards stated he got back on stage afterward and apologized but wasn’t able to find the specific audience members he insulted, saying “then of course they’d gone to the press,” quickly adding “as I think they should”
    * Richards says “I think it’s important for the Afro-American community [sic] to make sure this kind of crap doesn’t come about”
    * Letterman asks, “Having apologized, is there much more you can do?” Richards says “I just have to do personal work”
    * Letterman throws the floor over to Jerry, who says that nothing “justifies what happened” (there’s that passive voice again) but that he knows “how shattered [Richards] is by this” and that “he deserves a chance to apologize”
    * Letterman wraps up the interview with Richards, saying “I hope you don’t regret appearing on the show”; Richards only responds with a goodbye wave before his signal cuts out
    * Letterman jokes to Jerry, “I guess we can all go home now,” to which Jerry remarks that “this will be a breeze to segue back to comedy”

    One thing that modern-day viewers might not realize is the context here. At the time, Letterman’s show tended to be steeped in irony. He would regularly make up bits of “celebrity news” or other facts that were completely fictitious, or introduce a famous “celebrity” that turned out to be a poor-quality impersonator. Very little was taken seriously on Letterman’s show. So when Richards was introduced, appearing massively uncomfortable in a strange drab room that looked like something out of a Motel 6 in the dark heart of West Virginia somewhere, the audience could be forgiven for thinking it was some kind of bit. It was also Richards’ bad timing that his eruption happened on a Friday, and the whole world had had the weekend to absorb it before he was able to go on Letterman Monday and attempt damage control. Future celebs bedeviled by scandal would learn the magic of the Notes app and the carefully massaged PR message, but Richards blundered headlong into further trouble with his flailing and floundering, inarticulate appearance, his inartful references to “how blacks feel” and “the Afro-American community”, as well as seeming to imply that black people were so naturally violent that a racist tirade from a comedian would be enough to cause a “black-white conflict” to erupt around the nation.

    National Lampoon, of all things, authored what remains the definitive statement on the matter:

    How did Richards’ co-workers react?

    In addition to appearing on Letterman and facilitating Richards’ apology, Seinfeld threw his friend a bone by letting him voice a character in Bee Movie the following year. A couple of years later, Larry David let Richards make a few guest appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm poking fun at the Laugh Factory incident.

    Jason Alexander was asked about Richards’ racism on The Adam Carolla show last December (hey don’t laugh, it’s the number 1 podcast in the country!):

    Summing up, Alexander says “I love him completely,” but says “the four of us don’t see each other a lot.” He goes on to praise Richards’ talent and performance as Kramer effusively, crediting him with a share of the show’s success. He also says “I know his heart, and that’s all I can say about it.”

    Julia Louis-Dreyfus has not spoken about Richards’ racist outburst publicly that I’m aware of; anyone who has more information, feel free to let me know in the comments. However, she has stated that Richards took his acting very seriously on the set of Seinfeld, to the point of getting angry with the other actors when they’d start laughing in the middle of filming or make other mistakes. At one point he reportedly “joked” about hitting Louis-Dreyfus with a 2×4 piece of wood if she didn’t stop blowing takes.

    Ultimately, despite the support of his co-stars, the only other steady work Richards was able to get was as a supporting player in Kirstie, a sitcom produced by the cable channel TV Land, starring racist, homophobic Scientologist and MAGA nut Kirstie Alley as an actress attempting to reconnect with the son she gave up for adoption. Comedy gold. The show lasted one season.

    Today

    Earlier this month, it was announced that Richards had a memoir coming out, which I’m not even gonna bother mentioning the title of because fuck him. Immediately, somehow, a full-court press effort happened, with multiple major media outlets giving Richards column space to cry about how sorry he is and how miserable his life has been since then. God knows where he got the money for this PR push; maybe Seinfeld tossed him a bag of bills in sympathy now that Seinfeld has decided his new mission in life is to rage against “the extreme left and PC crap.” But anyway, now Richards is going to make his failure of a life everybody’s problem:

    In addition to the expected claims that he is “not a racist” and has “nothing against black people,” the articles contain some fairly polished bits of public relations, as Richards goes on at length about how wrong he was, how sorry he is, how people were right to condemn him and he accepts all that. Along the way, we learn a few fun tibits like how he’s taken up photography, underwent Jungian therapy, and went to Cambodia to study Hindu philosophy at one point. And there’s the requisite pictures of him posing with a cute dog. The Los Angeles Times article even throws his family under the bus by calling him “a lonely kid raised by a working mother” (how dare she) and mentioning that his grandmother suffered from mental illness. He also mentions that he was so insecure about his performance skills during his time on Seinfeld that he turned down offers to host Saturday Night Live and be granted a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Feel bad for him yet? Oh by the way, he had prostate cancer. Which yes, is bad and scary for anyone, but things like this just feel so calculated:

    I don’t know why this post is so long. We all know “ONTD doesn’t read” and there probably could have been a lot less words to use to describe this whole thing; sorry about that. It was just such a bizarre, surreal moment in pop culture; it was impossible to sit there watching the Letterman interview without this feeling of “is this really happening?” It will, of course, be up to the individual public to decide if Richards has done adequate penance for his remarks; of course 18 years is a lifetime in the world of celebrity. And if we really want to give the devil his due, the one saving grace we can allow Richards is that he hasn’t taken the obvious off-ramp to cry “canceled” and use his infamy to develop a following among the rabid far right, like Louis CK, Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais, and so many other people we’d like to forget exist. Bar on the floor, etc. But it just rankles that this guy is given such a wide-ranging platform for his belated apology tour when there’s so many talented comics and other artists out there who aren’t straight white men that can’t get a fraction of the same attention.

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