Kramer’s Unfortunate Story
On November 20th, 2006 the paparazzi site, TMZ posted a video of Michael Richards, most famously known as Kramer, the eccentric neighbor from the hit sitcom Seinfield. The video contained footage of Richards exploding at black audience members who were supposedly talking during his standup act. Outraged rants directed at audience members have happened before, but they have rarely involved yelling things like, “Shut up, 500 years we’d have you upside down with a f****ing fork up your ass!” to black audience members and exclaiming, “Throw his ass out. He’s a n*****!” This breakdown caught on a phone camera made a spark that eventually turned into a forest fire of a news story.
The TMZ article did exactly what all other paparazzi articles do. It put the situation through a simple and audacious lens. The journalist reports:
“Michael Richards exploded in anger as he performed at a famous L.A. comedy club last Friday, hurling racial epithets that left the crowd gasping, and TMZ has obtained exclusive video of the ugly incident.”
These visceral words give the reader more exaggerated feelings towards the subject of the story. I usually think that news stories should be written with a wider scope, but Michael Richards unfortunately fit the description. For this reason TMZ let the video speak for itself, giving no commentary on the situation: only a brief synopsis of what happened.
This video went viral in the pure sense of the word. The first YouTube video, released by TMZ, has been viewed over a million times. Because of this immediate popularity, there was no escape for Michael Richards. He was put under the intense heat of the media microscope. He accepted this fact and gave him self up for examination by going on the David Letterman Show to apologize. After a classic talk show segue, beginning with the casual, “Now this Michael Richards thing. Whoa…” Jerry Seinfeld introduces Richards via satellite. Michael Richards then begins to ramble about the regret and disbelief he felt. The crowd at first began to laugh, probably not in complete assurance that this was not a joke. This cheeky late night show was obviously not the right setting to apologize for such a heinous moment. Michael Richards did seem honest in his apologies, but also unstable. Although the setting was not right, David Letterman did rise to the occasion. He goes to a serious part of his personality that people rarely see, in which he asks sharp questions, getting to the meat of the issue. For example: “… Had the people doing the heckling or the people not paying attention, had they been uh white or Caucasian or uuuh any other race, what would’ve been the nature of your response then?” Although said in the stuttering, disjointed way talk show hosts like to speak, it was a direct question that attacked the basic racial issue revealed by the event. Letterman also tries to empathize with Michael Richards about the folly, graciously asking him if the rant was done as an attempt to diffuse the situation. If Richards was trying to clear his name with this appearance, he failed miserably. The fire continued to grow.
The New York Times then released an article two days later, musing at the debacle. The article by Virginia Hefferman is titled “Bewildered-Sounding Man and Bewildering Words”. This article has a critical eye of Richards but is also sympathetic about the apparent unbalanced state he was in. Hefferman remarks at the split personalities we see:
“It helped that for the chastening on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” where he appeared via satellite to explain the murderous-sounding bigotry he had expressed onstage in Los Angeles on Friday night, he no longer looked furious and fired up. Instead he appeared ashen, like a transplant candidate or an arrested priest. In this state Mr. Richards explained, extenuated and mumbled.”
This article stays mostly objective in its style. She admits that what Richards did was wrong, but she also reflects that Richards stayed real in his apology, pointing out that he was “winging it, without a damage-control team.” The article ends with a quote by Richards: “It comes through! It fires out of me! Even now, in the passion, and the — and the — that’s here, as I — as I — confront myself.” The quote leaves a lasting image of a man out of control, yet wanting to face his problems. Ending with just a quote gives the reader a sense that the story has only begun.
That same day, MSNBC released an article, “Richards says anger, not racism, sparked tirade”. The article was completely objective, merely describing the events that took place in the past two days. One interesting connection was made between Richards remarks and a recent incident with Mel Gibson. The journalist contemplates:
“His explanation was reminiscent of Mel Gibson’s assertion that he wasn’t anti-Semitic after he let off a barrage of Jewish slurs during a traffic stop last summer: despite what came out of his mouth, that’s not what is inside him.”
This strategy in which one brings up a related, previous story expresses interest in a possible pattern. This possibility of a pattern gives the story more credibility and forward motion.
NPR performed a story on the four days after the original video. The host of the program gives a short introduction, briefing the audience of the situation. Then, she hands the spotlight over to Jimmy Izrael, a columnist for the website AOL Black Voices. It is apparent that there are personal feelings of hurt from what Richards said. He opens up with,
“Some words are not ready to be adopted into the popular lexicon. They contain just enough venom to alienate people and put the speaker in a world of hurt. When people decide to use them, better that they be professionals like comedians.”
This opening line is opinionated, taking a stance against the overarching philosophy of Richards’s use of the N-word. The next sentence returns to sympathy on the celebrity by acknowledging that he is in a “world of hurt”. From sympathy, Izrael attacks Richards with a mocking point, saying that Richards actions make visible that he is not truly a professional comedian. The opinionated, sympathetic and satirical tone of these first three sentences set up the approach of the rest of article perfectly. Izrael then gives a possible explanation for some root cause in this racism:
“Richards…hit a stride in his role as lovable, hipster-doofus Cosmo Kramer on NBC's ‘Seinfeld,’ affectionately called, the show about nothing by its fans, better known as the show without black people at my barber shop. But we all postulated about how anyone who could suspend belief long enough to imagine a New York without any people of color.”
Izrael plants this seed in our psyches then moves on, letting the reader contemplate the issue on their own time. This can be a very effective way to cause a news story to grow from one’s article. If the writer leaves unresolved ideas, he or she is allowing readers to fill in the holes with their own opinion. Izrael then begins to comment on and satirize the reactions to Richards’s follies:
“I've been following the reaction in the media and it runs the gamet from free speech nicks(ph) applauding his forthrightness and taking the hecklers to pass to people that think Richards should never work again.
But what can we really do to him? We can't deport him. We can't sterilize them, cause he's already got kids. So what's the suitable penalty? We may never know… His career, such that it is, will survive this gaff because while it's no longer fashionable to be racist, we see time and time again that it's perfectly acceptable.”
This passage employs a term Joseph Harris coins in his book, Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts, “countering”. Countering can be defined as the rejection of others’ beliefs in order to make one’s own work stronger. Izrael is dismissing the acceptance that other people have exuded about this story in order to make the point that this issue is much bigger than the personal beliefs of a former sitcom star. He claims that this is part of a societal problem. Izrael finishes off the article by expressing a complete loss of hope for Richards’s true regret or good intent in the matter, reminding the reader that, “He has apologized but he's only sorry he was caught on tape.”
LA Times published an article by Michael Shermer on the same day as the NPR story titled “He’s a racist. So are you. So am I.” In this article Michael Shermen takes a psychological perspective on the issue. He boldly claims, “Consciously and publicly, Richards is probably not a racist. But unconsciously and privately, he is. So am I. So are you.” Shermen wants to communicate to his audience that racism is something that lives in everyone’s personal subconscious. To support this belief he cites a study done at Harvard about subconscious racism:
“The words and black and white faces appear on the screen one at a time, and you sort them into one of these categories: African American/Good or European American/Bad. Again you match the words with the concepts of good or bad, and faces with national origin. So the word "joy" would go into the first category and a white face would go into the second category. This sorting goes noticeably slower, but you might expect that because the combined categories are more cognitively complex.
Unfortunately, the final sorting task puts the lie to that rationalization. This time you sort the words and faces into the categories European American/Good or African American/Bad. Tellingly (and distressingly), this sorting process goes much faster than the previous one.”
This increased speed in sorting the second section of the test means that it comes much easier to people to correlate European with Good and African American with Bad. Hermen is disgusted with this fact but does assure the reader that these shockingly true, subconscious habits were found to be “true for everyone”, even non-whites. Hermen asserts that this racist tendency is evolutionary, harbored by living in small, tight bands of hunter-gatherers:
“This natural tendency to sort people into Within-Group/Good and Between-Group/Bad is shaped by culture, so that all Americans (including even those whose ancestry is African) implicitly inculcate the cultural association, which includes additional prejudices.”
Hermen blames the incident on “the sin of all humanity” and ends up calling for people to accept Richards’s apology, even to “…thank him for having the courage to confess in public what far too many of us still harbor in private, often in our unconscious minds.”
Unfortunately for Michael Richards, most people did the opposite of thanking him for what he did. Most of the country dismissed him as a symbol of racism. There seemed to be no hope for Richards, but like usual, time healed the wound. After the craze subsided, news of a return arose. On June 17th, 2009 an article published by Reuters read “Fallen ‘Seinfeld’ star Richards ‘a new man’”. Roger Friedman, the writer of the article, reports:
“Richards' flagging career ground to a halt in 2006 after he was captured on a cell phone camera delivering an alcohol-fueled racist tirade at some hecklers watching his routine at a Los Angeles comedy clubs. The master of physical comedy apologized profusely, and inadvertently drew studio-audience laughter while making a mea culpa on ‘Late Show with David Letterman’.”
Terms like “captured” and “alcohol-fueled” victimize Michael Richards, which could’ve only be done after time dulled the disdain felt by the American public. The writer even praises him as a “master of physical comedy”. It is evident that the goal of this article is to bring a long-lost, positive light to Michael Richards. The article announces his return to TV, joining his fellow Seinfeld stars in a reunion on Larry David’s show, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. Larry David is quoted in the article as calling Richards “a new man”. In this article, it seems as if Richards has been given a new chance.
News stories are incredibly flexible. Because they are dictated by one person at a time, there are always holes to fill in, points to reaffirm and beliefs to dissent from. From the inception of this story on the amateur footage of a cell phone camera, our concept of Michael Richards went from out of control bigot to depressive sap to social commentator to victim at the hands of paparazzi. This story’s life serves as a perfect example of the endless possibilities in which people can interpret an event and even judge a person.
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