‘Kramer’ racial rant more sad than satire

At least Mel Gibson could blame the booze.

Michael Richards, known to audiences as “Seinfeld’s” manic neighbor Kramer, dug himself a bottomless hole with a stand-up appearance over the weekend.

Comedy can be a dangerous thing, especially when it’s performed by a rusty stand-up with anger-management issues.

Mr. Richards took on a pair of black hecklers Friday night at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood with a stream of racial slurs. Captured on grainy video, the outburst caught fire online and led to Mr. Richards making an uncomfortable apology on Monday’s “The Late Show With David Letterman.”

It’s a mystery why Mr. Richards was on stage in the first place.

The longtime sitcom actor toyed with stand-up comedy before finding marginal fame on the ABC sketch comedy show “Fridays.” He later worked in film and television before securing his niche in pop-culture lore on “Seinfeld,” which aired from 1989 to 1998.

His stand-up cobwebs were all-too evident in his disastrous appearance last weekend, which might just have rung the death knell for an already infirm career.

Robert Thompson, founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, says Mr. Richards attempted a mid-rant “Hail Mary” Friday when he tried to turn his rage into a socially redeeming bit about the power of racist terminology.

“I think he was on his feet trying to rescue this and turn it into a Lenny Bruce moment,” said Mr. Thompson, recalling how the brutally frank Mr. Bruce would turn racism on its ugly head in his monologues. “You could see he was beginning to carve himself an escape route.”

But, ultimately, he couldn’t escape his anger.

“For all the politeness and distance we’ve [traveled] since the civil rights era, there’s still such a huge amount of festering, racist rage in the least expected places,” says Mr. Thompson, before asking, “Who’d expect it from Kramer?”

Comics routinely drill into that subterranean anger. Mr. Bruce’s profanity-laced bits led the way, and modern comics like Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle have taken that bawdy baton.

Stand-up Lisa Lampanelli’s entire shtick leverages negative racial stereotypes for laughs. It’s all in good fun, she tells audiences in the tradition of Don Rickles. She also says using tired stereotypes is her way of defusing them.

Audiences are the judge of that, and they’re willing to buy it from comics with the confidence and seasoning to wade into troubled social waters with a clear purpose.

Take current comedy king Sacha Baron Cohen. He fearlessly traffics in highly charged ethnic and racial stereotypes. But he filters the bigotry through the medium of a laughably ignorant comic persona, Borat. The anti-Semitic Kazakh TV personality is also weirdly engaging enough to prise out the latent prejudices in others — the better to expose them to ridicule.

Bloggers were laughing at, not with, Mr. Richards this week.

Blogger David Kronke at www.insidesocal.com/tv said that if the 57-year-old actor was “trying to get viewers to believe that he was, in fact, nuts (and therefore his racist diatribe became somewhat understandable), then just maybe he succeeded.”

Mr. Kronke added, in a theme other bloggers shared, that the outburst might just be “viral marketing” for the latest “Seinfeld” DVD package, released yesterday.

The only party to benefit from Mr. Richards’ outburst might be his fellow comics, Mr. Thompson said.

“This is to those comics what Monica Lewinsky was to Jay and David … a comic’s dream come true,” Mr. Thompson said.