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

maybe he stuck a fork up his own ass?

Pitts, who was not one of the hecklers, added: ‘He didn’t say sorry to me. He offended everyone in the room that night. He needs to make a public apology.’

Comic Paul Rodriguez, who was also on the bill, added: ‘Once the word nigger comes out of your mouth, you have a whole lot of explaining to do.’

Richards, was back on the Laugh Factory stage on Saturday night.

haha, Rodriguez then realised his mistake and proceeded to do a whole lot of explaining himself.

xpost

-- 2 american 4 u (n...), November 20th, 2006.

I'm gonna go ahead and disagree there. Although I think it was a combo of writing and the entire cast that made the show so successful, I think the Kramer character was near or at the top for ability to make people laugh. Being typecast because you played a certain character so well doesn't mean you are an 'unfunny' comedian.

Asshole racist? Evidently. Not funny outside of that hateful context? No.

no, this is obviously the work of H.E. Pennypacker

Or maybe I just don't like the idea of branding people with a capital R. = Or maybe I just don't like the idea of branding people with a capital N.

WTF to that logic?

KKKramer!!!!

xpost

i was tempted to do a lame zing abotu Richards having appeared in the movie Coneheads

not true! he had 8 episodes shot of The Michael Richards Show in 2000. he also had bit parts in Coneheads and Airheads so therefore that heckler jerk is just downright wrong.

"Just because he murdered someone doesn't mean he's necessarily a murderer."

This is different. A murderer is defined as someone who has murdered, and that's a fact that's easily proven most of the time on account of the victim being dead.

A racist is someone who discriminates against those of another race, or merely believes in the inferiority of another race. But we can't always prove someone's belief unless the person totally owns up to it, and we can always argue about what counts as discrimination, and/or how much of it is sufficient to definitively incriminate someone.

The tape started when he started his attack, so we don't get to hear the heckler's attack, which could either mitigate or damn Richards. We don't know what was said, but if the heckler was being racist, there is a point to be made: less than 50 years ago, black people were being hunted down in the US because of racists and racism, and now this guy's being casually racist? Here, what if he calls you a nigger? Does that make you realise what's you're doing?

On my first watching of it, that's what I interpreted it as, at least, because that was all that really made sense. All the other alternatives do damn him as a racist, but doing that on an out-of-context 2 minute clip is a bit much.

O-T-M

Dan, this is exactly my point. What he did was horrible, but people here seemed overly interested in now being able to call him a RACIST.

Gays are discriminated against the most as of 2007, obviously. Racism will more than likely cease to exist in 50 years. Anyone who morphs the issues around their own personal agendas should blow their own brains out.

― billstevejim, Friday, April 13, 2007 1:57 PM bookmarkflaglink

this hasn't aged particularly well

I can understand why YouTube comments threads would have people arguing about this, since YouTube comments threads seem to be populated exclusively by repulsive morons; I'm having a little bit of trouble figuring out why ILX would have to argue anything out about this.

P.S. I am really sick of people who are all like "black people call each other nigger all the time" -- this is a severely fucked-up perception based on people getting their information on What Black People Do All the Time pretty much solely from hip-hop videos and The Wire and shit, and I seriously wonder if people who say that honestly believe that the middle-aged woman in the next cubicle at work seriously goes home to her kids and says "what's up, my niggas, we're having Applebee's tonight!"

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, November 20, 2006 4:09 PM bookmarkflaglink

conversely, this has aged like fine wine

Quite the time capsule, this.

I sometimes think about this incident as something of a watershed moment, since it took place in 2006, right between the launches of YouTube and the iPhone. Only a few years earlier, and the video wouldn't have made its way to the Internet so quickly and been watched so easily.

I also remember my reaction on this thread, which I'm not proud of now. I was very bothered by the fact that people were so quick to call Richards a racist based entirely on the video. In my mind, it was an argument against essentialism (is he "really" a racist, or did he just do a racist thing?) -- but it ultimately amounted to a defense of Richards that I shouldn't have been so invested in, with the privilege of viewing such incidents from a purely academic perspective.

i know no one knew what racism was in 2006 or whatever but fucking hell

Is your experience so limited that you've never seen non-racist people behave this way? I know a guy from Texas...he will say some of the most racial shit you ever heard right to a black man's face...He's a blues musician...that doesn't stop him from making chicken jokes...

yeah, that was called out in 2006 and isn't really in the spirit of the revive