Michael Richards, left, with Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jerry Seinfeld in series nine of Seinfeld
Michael Richards' recent gig at an LA comedy club plays like the darkest, nastiest, most taboo-baiting script that Larry David never wrote. There on centre stage is the man still best known as Cosmo Kramer out of Seinfeld. In the audience sits a heckler who also happens to be black. "Fifty years ago we'd have held you upside down with a fucking fork up your arse," Richards roars. He then appeals to some unseen authority to "throw his arse out, he's a nigger, he's a nigger."
There is plenty more in this vein: you can catch the ugly, unabridged version on YouTube.
Richards' on-screen alter-ego was a hyperactive free spirit, an inviolate innocent who (in the words of the envious George Costanza) "gets sex without dating and falls ass-backwards into money". But off-screen, Richards appears to have found life more a trial. His post-Seinfeld sitcom was cancelled after a few episodes and his subsequent career has floundered. During the course of his on-stage meltdown, the actor ruefully refers to himself as "a wash-up".
Judged on the video evidence this is just another story of a celebrity veering calamitously off-message; a racist being unmasked. So why does the whole thing feel like an un-filmed episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm? Possibly it's because so much of David's humour pivots on the racial faux-pas of his characters (one thinks of Elaine's confusion as to whether her new boyfriend is actually black, or Larry's run-in with the cable guy). Or maybe it's because these comedy of embarrassments traditionally culminate in the abject humiliation and disgrace of the main protagonist.
Perhaps Richards genuinely believed that his insults struck an appropriate tone for the bawdy ambience of a late-night comedy club. But when leaked across the internet they sound like the boorish rant of a lifelong bigot.
Today, as he prepares to don the hair-shirt, the man who once was Kramer looks anything but innocent and anything but inviolate. He looks, in fact, like Larry David without the wit, or George Costanza with a mean streak. Unlike them, however, he probably won't be back for another round of hilarious misadventures, same time next week.
