If there is a professional upside to being filmed bawling racial abuse at members of your own audience, it would seem to bring you powerful new celebrity friends. Such, at least, has been the experience of Seinfeld's Michael Richards, disgraced after his notorious outburst at LA's inaptly named Laugh Factory - but now consoled by the caring, sharing Mel Gibson.
"I felt like sending Michael Richards a note," Gibson has announced to Entertainment Weekly , and one senses that the billet doux would be tender indeed. "I feel really badly for the guy," Gibson continues. "He was obviously in a state of stress."
Stress, of course, is something Gibson knows all about, having found himself so riddled with tension back in July that he was obliged to loosen up with a lengthy drinking binge, after which he enlivened his arrest for driving under the influence with a series of anti-semitic insults.
So Gibson is all empathy for the cruelly put-upon Richards: "They'll probably torture him for a while and then let him go," he reflected, failing to expand on who "they" might be, but adding poignantly: "I like him."
How grateful Richards is likely to be for the embrace of the man who drunkenly announced "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" remains unclear as he conducts his grand apologia around the US. (There again, following the Laugh Factory debacle, at least one group of past audience members came forward to accuse Richards of having indulged in similar anti-Jew banter himself).
Still, he can always look to Gibson as an example of how a retched-up volley of bigotry need be no obstacle to a flourishing career. The tireless actor/director used the same EW interview to talk up his next film Apocalypto, and remark on the lack of any great consequence after the events of this summer. "Hollywood is what you make it," Gibson shrugged. "There is no great poobah up there saying 'Go! You are condemned!'"
Some (probably the damnable "they" again) might feel Gibson could have at least nodded to the unacceptability of Richards' behaviour, in between expressing his finer feelings for him. There again, this is a man who still refers to his own racist tantrum as "an unfortunate experience that I stumbled across." As for Richards, currently begging forgiveness hither and yon, he and we alike will have to wait and see where his next declaration of moral support comes from. Hitler's ghost?
