Pickle Barrel
JUST AS THE BORAT furor was beginning to die down last month, another scandal rocked the comedy world: Michael Richards, Kramer on Seinfeld, used the racist N-word on a Black heckler in an L.A. comedy club.
What Richards forgot, along with whatever good taste he might have had at some point, was that we live in a digital video world. Sure enough, a patron of the Laugh Factory was recording Richards’s meltdown and posted it on the Internet for the entire world to see.
The reaction was swift and suitably merciless.
Richards was branded a racist, he offered a clumsy apology on David Letterman, and the minutiae of his blunder was parsed on every talk show and comedy blog.
What a mess for Mr. Richards! Of course nobody defended him. The use of the N-word, especially in anger, is indefensible.
Using that ugly word in a comedy club is the equivalent of setting off a nuclear bomb. It vaporizes all argument.
Which is perhaps part of the problem. Branding Richards a racist may be too easy an explanation for what went down that night. Watching the grainy amateur footage with inferior sound quality, I tried to reconstruct the motives Richards might have had.
Was it simple racism? Maybe … but unlike the racial slurs of Mel Gibson, he has no history of this kind of behaviour.
Now any comic has been in this situation before: getting heckled by a bunch of rowdy, partying, clubgoers.
What an experienced comic will do is pull out any number of rehearsed one-liners meant to restore order and diminish his opponent.
You can use race if absolutely necessary, but only in a witty and oblique way.
But Richards is no stand-up comic.
He hasn’t done any serious club work since the late ’70s. And his career since Seinfeld has been in stall, with a failed sitcom and at least one stillborn pilot. Returning to a nightclub act on a Thursday night had to involve the taste of a bit of crow.
So you can imagine his fragile state as he, the great Kramer, is made fun of by a gang of punters. Furiously, he explodes.
What is the worst thing he can say to these jerks that have turned him into their object of derision? What pain can he rain upon their heads?
And the N-word comes out.
Again. And again.
Michael Richards makes the worst decision in show business since Decca records passed on the Beatles in 1963.
It’s a general rule of comedy that you can only joke about members of your own race. So it’s not that the N-word is invisible; in fact, it’s ubiquitous in contemporary culture.
It’s in a lot of rap songs. It’s the title of Dick Gregory’s groundbreaking book.
And it’s even been used by white performers, if gingerly.
Lenny Bruce had a famous routine centering on the word. Patti Smith had a song where she chanted the word, comparing the plight of the American artist to the perpetual Black underclass.
Nobody complained much about these uses of the word. The difference, of course, is that Richards used it in anger, directed against a relatively innocent audience member.
You could also take a Freudian view of his actions. Why was that word, that horrible word, burbling around in Michael Richards’ subconscious?
Could it be that after a decade of a non-career, deep down he identified with what that awful word signifies, because it was the way he regarded himself? We often hate in others what we fear in ourselves.
Meanwhile, the conflagration continues. The white owner of the Laugh Factory bans the use of the N-word from its stage, even by Black comedians. The Black owner of an all-Black comedy club in downtown L.A. counters with a total anti-censorship policy. The great Paul Mooney, who wrote much of Richard Pryor’s act, announces he will stop using the word in his act, no small feat.
Richards meets with the two audience members he attacked. Let the healing begin.
He is promptly slapped with a lawsuit. A few weeks later, Pauly Shore is onstage in Austin, Texas, and is punched to the ground by an angry heckler.
The video makes the rounds on the Internet, until Pauly reveals the whole thing was staged: a hoax, ha ha. As Marx said: history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
So now what? Is Richards savvy enough to make lemonade out of this lemon?
Don’t recoil: At least he has our attention. His only hope may be to stage an apology tour with a rainbow coalition of comics and the proceeds going to a Black charity. America, after all, always loves a good penitent.
Don’t believe me? Mel Gibson, sputtering anti-Semitic and sexist spew when arrested for drunk driving last year, performed a year’s worth of media mea culpas. His latest film, Apocalypto, opened at number one to good reviews and healthy box office even though it’s in a Mayan dialect.
Don’t you just love Hollywood?
Post City Magazines’ humour columnist, Mark Breslin, is the founder and owner of the Canada-wide Yuk Yuk’s chain of comedy clubs. The former comedian and TV producer is also the author of several books, including Control Freaked.
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