IT WAS KRAMER VERSUS KRAMER
Richards bares self-hate over N-word
“Seinfeld” star Michael Richards obliquely opens up about his notorious racist tirade in his upcoming memoir, “Entrances and Exits.”
The 74-year-old, who played Kramer, lashed out — unleashing a stream of racial slurs — at a comedy-club audience that heckled him in 2006.
Richards writes that he was still smarting from the failure of his post-“Seinfeld” sitcom “The Michael Richards Show,” which lasted only eight episodes in 2000 — despite there being six years between the series’ cancellation and the incident at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles.
That appalling night
The comedian writes that, during his set, he heard talking coming from the balcony and yelled “Shut the f--k up!” to the delight of the audience.
He then heard someone from the balcony call out: “’You’re not funny. We don’t think you’re very funny!’”
Richards writes that he took the remark “pretty hard. A solid punch below the belt.”
Although he does not detail in the book what he said, video from the night shows him saying, “Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a f--king fork up your ass,” and calling one of the hecklers the N-word.
“Of course, looking back at all, I wish I had just agreed with him,” Richards writes of the audience member.
“He went low and I went even lower,” he writes. “We both ended up at the bottom of the barrel.”
The Emmy winner shares that, after the shocking incident, the words “you’re not funny” kept running through his mind.
“He laid it out so clearly, so simply, my biggest fear — not being funny,” he writes. “Later, I’ll come to realize that all of this, everything he said, is me. His voice is my voice. This is all ME going on. My inferiority sets in. My anger erupts.”
After footage of the incident began to circulate three days later, the comedian appeared on the “Late Show with David Letterman” to apologize.
Richards writes that his “Seinfeld” castmates Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus all reached out but he was “embarrassed” and “concerned about the mess spilling onto them.”
He declined any interviews at the time and, on the advice of actress Frances Fisher, retreated to Mexico for several weeks of soul-searching. Richards and his girlfriend also visited Cambodia, India and Thailand, seemingly on a spiritual quest.
The actor confesses that he has “some regrets” but believes in the “continuity of the soul, writing that “screwups in life are necessary.”
Richards made a rare red-carpet appearance with his old castmate Jerry Seinfeld at the premiere of the latter’s movie “Unfrosted.”