WTF?: "Seinfeld"'s Michael 'Kramer' Richards in Weird-o-Rama Onstage Meltdown

but that's the thing, this idea that it isn't racism unless it's a lynching, you're not a racist unless you wear a white hood, etc. the point is that those words and that assertion of power are all sitting there, with all of their history, accessible to any white person -- or any non-black person, really -- in this society. they don't have the power they used to -- saying "50 years ago we would've" doesn't actually turn 2006 into 1956 -- but they still have a lot of power because of the history they deliberately invoke. it's like this loaded gun that is supposed to be locked up in a museum exhibit and we're all supposed to agree not to use it. when someone goes ahead and uses it anyway, they're violating part of our complicated modern social contract.

and having a racist tirade in public is not in any way like smoking one cigarette or kissing one guy, unless you think cigarette smoking or guy kissing are somehow morally comparable to racism.

nor is it morally comparable to murder, was the point.

I thought Letterman did a good job interviewing him, actually, considering the circumstances. He tried to keep the rambling on track and brought the focus on race when Kramer started to wander off into tangent-land

no, the point was that there's a fallacy in the notion that racist -- or murderer -- is something you are rather than something you do. you can spend all day every day thinking about killing people, but if you never hurt a fly you're not a murderer. you can spend all day every day hating black people, but if you never visibly or vocally act on it, for the purposes of the society you are not a racist. our codes of racial conduct are entirely bound up in how we act toward each other. so michael richards is now a racist in a way that some guy who legitimately hates people of other races but has never once articulated or demonstrated it is not. we get bound up in these questions of essentiality -- is someone a racist in their soul or something -- but those questions are not the point.

I think this is completely OTM.

The question in my mind is, what happens when, in a black-white confrontation, the black person says (in effect) "I think you're a piece of shit specifically because of your whiteness". Does this break the social contract in the same way (though obviously not to the same degree)?

Because it sounds like Richards probably wasn't responding to a racially-based taunt -- "you suck because you're white". But I'm curious as to whether there's a way he could've replied "you're _____ because you're black" -- and not in a soft-pedaled, good-natured way, but with as much vitriol as his heckler did -- or whether it's his obligation to just not go there.

xpost it's a completely self-involved apology is OTM;

the reason he relied on this was because somewhere inside him he believes it

I'm still not so sure of this, I think "go for the jugular" could have been as much as, if not more of, a factor.

i'm not sure about this, so don't think comparisons to murder/murderer are accurate in this way either, altho it is interesting to think about (not me 'murdering people' i mean).

no because that part of the social contract is built around our specific racial history. i mean, there's the generic part that is just, basically, in a multicultural society the resort to ethnic/religious/whatever insults is a generally bad act. but the whole section on black-white relationships is a lot more detailed and a lot more complicated. calling someone a cracker or a white motherfucker or whatever doesn't draw on hundreds of years of slavery, subjugation, rape and murder. but calling someone a nigger and saying "50 years ago we would've..." does. it is an offense of entirely different magnitude.

But that laughing--oh man. A signal moment in the history of television.

gypsy and and what, cf. horseshoe upthread, in a time-travelling response to lurker 2421 - link

He/she wouldn't -- that was Richards's most egregiously racist and offensive comment, to be sure. Including the normative "we", etc.

xpost

no because that part of the social contract is built around our specific racial history. i mean, there's the generic part that is just, basically, in a multicultural society the resort to ethnic/religious/whatever insults is a generally bad act. but the whole section on black-white relationships is a lot more detailed and a lot more complicated. calling someone a cracker or a white motherfucker or whatever doesn't draw on hundreds of years of slavery, subjugation, rape and murder. but calling someone a nigger and saying "50 years ago we would've..." does. it is an offense of entirely different magnitude.

No, I completely agree.

But -- setting aside the lynching comment, setting aside the word "nigger" -- in short, setting aside Richards's specific offenses:

Is there any way a white improv comic can respond to an attack on his "whiteness" with a counterattack on "blackness"? Or is he obligated to shrug the racial element off?

(This isn't meant to be a rhetorical/baiting question, I'm honestly curious as to how people think through this stuff)

I assume you mean the mark foley comment, its a reference to the Onion political cartoon in which the cartoons 'defends' mark foley. Except I'm being entirely serious, to a degree - while its important Richards understands that he harbors racist tendencies to me the idea of labelling someone 'racist' is less about damning them and more about getting them to understand exactly what that means and what should be done about it.

lurker, does the phrase "common courtesy" mean anything to you??

seems SO unlikely in the first place why even bother to consider adequate responses?

well, two things. on one hand, yeah, obviously in these situations the person becomes kind of a scapegoat, a sacrifice that the rest of us make to prove that we're not racist, and so all the huffing and puffing and shocked-shocked moralizing seems self-serving. but on the other hand, not "losing self-control" is part of the deal here. we don't mandate that nobody harbor any racist or bigoted beliefs; we can't mandate that. what we mandate -- in some cases by law, in others (like this one) by custom -- is how people act toward each other. and so maintaining "self-control" is actually really important. and the social insistence on maintaining self-control, and the sanctions we impose for not maintaining it, are our primary mechanisms for protecting people against the effects of bigotry. if michael richards or mel gibson throws a racist fit and there's no consequences for it, then our protections against racism -- which are kind of shaky to start with -- are eroded a little.

'd like to see him make an apology that seems to indicate some understanding about why his words were inappropriate,

well, me too. but it's possible that if he were the kind of guy able to do that, he'd also be the kind of guy who wouldn't have flipped out in the first place.

He was kind of like the dad that brings his son back to the store and forces him to return all of the candy he stole.

Right, this is exactly what I'm talking about -- the idea that we accept that you can't hit back in the same way. Because I think (and I may be totally wrong here) that's actually central to Richards's meltdown! He basically is saying "You think I won't call you on this because you're black", I think that's the thing he's tapping into.

The thing is, rap battle, the dozens, putdown comedy, shit like that -- you're supposed to be able to say anything. You're supposed to say "Your mother is a sore-infested crack whore" etc. etc. and the other guy laughs it off. So the idea that there's this third rail is worth talking about, because I think it's exactly this line that Richards consciously crossed.

yes! if they are really funny!

But wasn't he being heckled for being an unfunny has-been? Why does race have to play into it?

x-post

Here's video of Michael Richards, a.k.a. Seinfeld's Kramer, stinking up the joint recently at The Laugh Factory. Responding to a heckler, Richards goes on an n-word tear that starts out like a Lenny Bruce/Dick Gregory-ish bit that's trying to straddle off-color (literally) humor and social commentary but then never climbs above simple offensiveness. Proving that audiences really do run the world, the offended heckler gets off the best line in the exchange (which is not saying much, to be sure) when he makes fun of Richards' meager post-Seinfeld career.

Richards has already apologized for his rant (to his slim credit, he didn't blame alcohol), which has been called a career killer. Though that, pace the heckler, presumes that Richards was not already a Hollywood nosferatu.

A number of people I know have drawn parallels between Richards' yapping and the musings of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat, who trades in similarly offensive stereotypes and has freaked the shit of some observers even as he rules the nation's movie roost. Why is one considered awful while the other is dubbed comic and box-office gold (though to be sure, Borat has his detractors)?

I don't think it's too complicated: First and foremost, the audience is in on Borat's shtick. On some level, we can feel superior to the poor fools who are revealed as chumps. What makes the Borat stuff more interesting is that we often feel sympathy for the stooges, especially the ones who are trying to be polite to the crazy Kazakh and then get goaded into offensive or humiliating speech and behavior. In the end, I think Borat is in many ways a satire of American "friendliness" (every state in the Union, it seems, claims to be the friendliest of all), of our national willingness to want to respect the customs, traditions, and mores of foreign cultures (we're a pluralist melting pot and all that). Perhaps most important, there's an unmistakable sense of control: Cohen knows what he's doing, it's planned out, etc. You never confuse Cohen the creator with his characters and hence, even if you don't find him funny, you know on some level you're brothers under the skin. Unless you're those South Carolina frat boys. Or the guy who beat Borat up in New York after thinking he was serious in a sexual advance (even more evidence that the audience has a mind of its own). Which is the point: Borat creates an in-group between him and his viewers, while Richards simply alienates his crowd.

Part of what is disturbing about Richards' performance is the palpable sense of flop sweat, of desperation. You see a guy who reaches first for the easiest comeback to an African-American heckler and then can't trade up to actually being funny, to pull himself out of a simple assertion of power (whether based on skin color or, tellingly, celebrity). In that failure--especially coming from the actor who was truly transcendent as the funniest next-door neighbor in sitcom history--you see an ugly pentimento of the worst sort of race relations.

this apology is not about making amends -- and really, how could he? -- but about subtly shifting the victimhood from the people in the club/whoever has had to be exposed to this shit/race relations/anyone who has to hear the sorta bullshit backbending we've seen on this thread to himself. it's a completely self-involved apology

i agree with this to at least some extent. but i thought he was also explicitly saying in part that he wanted to limit the impact of the incident on the public - trying to mitigate any incitement it might have provided to further racism in the public at large. i'm not certain about the extent to which that effort was in good faith, but i also didn't see a reason to be more than somewhat skeptical.

again, my point is i think both lynching and a dude-cracking-up-and-using-the-word are 'racism', but to merely leave it at that fails to examine whether they aren't motivated by different impulses, and might also be a poorer way of addressing the problem than just shunning the dude.

xpost I think he's saying "nigger nigger nigger" dude.

Right, but right afterward he says some other shit that's illuminating about why he went there. Well, it could be illuminating, or it could be just bullshit excuses.

are there many instances of a white comedian performing to a predominantly black audience (where race-based heckling may be somehow deemed more 'acceptable')?

I'm going to assume everyone's past the "OMG is it really racist to call black people niggers and talk about how they should be lynched" (hint: yes) and into the "interesting social analysis of how incidents like this are perceived by the public" part.

P.S. Y'all have no idea how infuriated I get by this aggrieved-white-people backlash against blackness where some people work from an assumption that black people get away with everything and can't be criticized and OMG lucky black people living it up with hos in hot tubs and are cooler than white people and better at sex and can beat you up and c.; this perception of black privilege (based in part on fetishization of blackness) is like a form of white psychosis every bit as pitiful as old-school racism.

I was thinking about this thread a lot last night, and I realized that what it came down to was that my definition of racist (noun) was narrower than other people's, that I was didn't think that behavior alone was sufficient to slap a label on someone. And this is maybe because I think people are basically good, and because I scare myself sometimes when I think how easy it would be to commit immoral or illegal actions, despite thinking of myself as basically good, too. There's probably some personal baggage here, but whatever.

I'm still inclined to think that "murderer" and "racist" occupy different categories, that the first is an unavoidable label that one assumes after one has committed a cut-and-dry crime, whereas the other is more like the word "evil," which requires shades of meaning and determination of intention. But I'm not entirely sure why I think that, and I can totally see why Mark and Jesse prefer to sidestep all that and just use the infinitely simpler "did a racist thing = is a racist" formulation.