Michael Richards (Kramer) melts down!

[MuniAddict]

Unbelievable! Michael Richards (seinfeld's kramer) doing standup at the famed laugh factory gets heckled, and all hell breaks loose! He really lost it and I think his carreer is in serious jeopardy!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=j2AVfSBJQHA

He'll be on with seinfeld tonight on letterman to "explain" what happened and apparently apologize. You be the judge.

[spazdude222]

Unbelievable! Michael Richards (seinfeld's kramer) doing standup at the famed laugh factory gets heckled, and all hell breaks loose! He really lost it and I think his carreer is in serious jeopardy!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=j2AVfSBJQHA

He'll be on with seinfeld tonight on letterman to "explain" what happened and apparently apologize. You be the judge.
wow...thats...bad...i hope he pulls through! and has learned his lesson...

[habbywall]

I think the people posting comments are right.
That guy shouldn't have interrupted the show. But he had no right to call him those names.
But that guy shouldn't have called him a cr@cker.

[iridemymuni]

Michael doesn't go to where that guy works and throw rocks at him while he's mowing.

why should that guy interrupt him?

i understand why he got so angry, it was a little over the top but its not the end of the world.

[spazdude222]

Michael doesn't go to where that guy works and throw rocks at him while he's mowing.

why should that guy interrupt him?

i understand why he got so angry, it was a little over the top but its not the end of the world.
yeah...I think the racial slur was alittle too far, but if you can't take a joke about your race or religion, don't go to see a comedy act!

[podzol]

I just really wonder why that kind of language and ideas pop out when he (and Mel Gibson) were in a rage. I know what it's like to loose my temper, but stuff like that just isn't even in me to come out.

It is all really strange and disturbing to me. I wonder how many other folks are sitting on awful prejudiced feelings who hide the feelings rather than dealing with them.

Maybe this is a question for psychologists on the fora.

[Jerrick]

yeah...I think the racial slur was alittle too far, but if you can't take a joke about your race or religion, don't go to see a comedy act!

I dont care when people make fun of my race. It doesnt effect me, maybe the words would of been hurtful to me years ago when there was really a reason why the words would hurt, but now and days its just a word.

Call me anything you want, it wont affect me.

True about your last sentence. Basically every stand-up comic is just being paid to be a jerk, they make fun of themselves and of everybody else, because its funny, not to be offensive, but thats what makes people laugh, and the more people laugh, the more money they make.

[James_Potter]

:(

[koebwil]

He was making a commentary on how you can be rude to a guy on stage, but you can't be rude to someone else if you say a certain word. He may have said the N word, but it had a reason behind it. He was showing the hypocrisy that was inside of that man. I actually thought he was in the right there. If you can't be rude to a guy by saying the N word, why can you be rude to a comedian for performing comedy, or be rude to a white man by calling him cracker? The sort of asshole thinking that this guy in the crowd exhibited was akin to the thinking of lynch mobs, nazis, and other bigoted groups in the 40s. Which is why he referenced them.

In my opinion the primary problem with Richards was when he broke the fourth wall. He should have just let it go.

[entropy]

At any comedy performance, heckling is par for the course. Some comics welcome outbursts and insults because they add a dimension of audience participation and provide a tangible butt for jokes. FYI.

[bcwheelriderguyhehehehehe]

Yeah I dont' think it was at all very racist. Every time I get nailed on a racist joke I just say I hate everyone and love everyone equally:D

[koebwil]

At any comedy performance, heckling is par for the course. Some comics welcome outbursts and insults because they add a dimension of audience participation and provide a tangible butt for jokes. FYI.
Don't worry I know about stand up. I did my research. I just thought leaving the guy be would have been a better response.

[habbywall]

Does anybody know what Kramer said that got this guy to start heckling him? Or what the heckler said before the camera startted rolling.

[john_childs]

Does anybody know what Kramer said that got this guy to start heckling him? Or what the heckler said before the camera startted rolling.
That part has been conveniently edited out of the video that's running round the net right now. Does make you wonder.

[DustinSchaap]

Ouch

[john_childs]

So it's about the money now (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATWTKhmNWBU). :rolleyes:
Link is to a video clip from the Today Show of an interview with the two targets of Richards' tirade.

Sorry guys. Wrong answer.
Listen to the last bit of the interview. One of the victims says something to the effect of "I think freedom of speech should have some kind of limit". O RLY now? Let me run that by the ACLU and see what they say.

Sorry, that's not the way it works in the USA. You can't have freedom of speech for me but not for thee. All sides have the same freedom of speech no matter how ugly it may be. Fred Phelps has freedom of speech, the Aryan Nations has freedom of speech, Jesse Jackson has freedom of speech, Cindy Sheehan has freedom of speech. Everyone has the same freedom of speech. It's not speech that I like is good and speech I don't like is bad. You don't get to pick and choose. If it worked that you could be sued for "bad" speech then Fred Phelps would be broke by now. Instead it works the other way. Fred Phelps actually sues when he is denied or prevented from demonstrating in public. And he wins those suits. There is nothing illegal about what he does. Distasteful yes. Illegal no.

Frankly that comment about freedom of speech needing a limit offends me much much more than some tirade by a comic on stage. People who grow up in the US should know better. What are they teaching in civics class now?

It's all about the money and the ignorance about what is freedom of speech. The lawyer knows that too. That's why she's playing that little game of having a retired judge hear the case because if a real judge heard it there would be no case. There is nothing illegal about what Michael Richards said. Michael Richards would not be found guilty of anything in a real court. There was no slander or libel or anything of the sort. Sorry, freedom of speech wins.

I can't wait for the ACLU to jump in and defend Michael Richards.

[ntappin]

After watching that video of the today show and the video of him freaking out, I really think that this whole thing is pretty dumb. Yes he said some things he shouldn't have, and yeah he went overboard.

There have been other similar rants that have been a little less emotional that have actualy turned into really good (although perhaps offencive to some) comedy routines. I think he was just trying to dance around the fine line where few white comics try and go. He was trying, it seemed, to demonstrate that the usage of the word nigger is shocking and that the shock value of it it blown out of proportion.

K that last part didn't quite come out right, but hopefully you get the idea.

I think that he became emotional while trying to pull off a very difficult joke that can make even very straight minded and smart comedians struggle, and this turned the situation from a shocking joke into an uncontrolled outburst of annoyance, and once he realized he had shot himself in the foot, he might aswell go on.

I would say too that the two men who were the target of it are making too big of a deal and are clearly just trying to get their 15 minutes of fame from it. This whole idea of a fake judge is just retarded and I really hope that Kramer doesn't go through with it. I think he should just contact them personaly, not through some stupid lawyer, and appologize, if they can't take that then its their own problem.

I don't know how many people have seen the movie waking life, but there is a scene in it where a woman (don't remember who she actualy is) describes words, how they came to be, and how we decide what they mean. It talks about how we ascribe (is that the right word?) emotions, meanings, and other intangible things to words that really mean nothing. Here is the clip of that. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btHzhVATKhA)

[monkeyman]

The two black guys are acting like crybabies, in my opinion. Am I being a callous asshole? Quite possibly. But, despite what Doss says, I have that right.

[ThisGuyIKnow]

I think they at least deserve their money back for whatever they paid to get in that night because certainly no one expected Michael Richards to go off on a racial tirade. I mean if you were going to see Lenny Bruce you knew what you were in for, but this is a bit different. The club however should not legally required in anyway to refund them their admissions, but just as a business decision it would be a smart move. Of course it could set a dangerous precedent.

But Michael Richards clearly does have some highly prejudiced views that hopefully this incident opens his eyes to.

[john_childs]

But Michael Richards clearly does have some highly prejudiced views that hopefully this incident opens his eyes to.
Clearly? A tirade on stage by a comic does not clearly show the person has prejudiced views any more than a carpenter hitting his thumb with a hammer shows his religious views. If he acts like that out in real life, like say to a cab driver or other people he works with, then I'll begin to suspect he has some pent up racial views.

Comics rely on prejudice and stereotypes for their material. Especially in stand-up comedy where there is no time for character development so must rely on stereotypes and prejudices for the building blocks of some of their material. Lots of sitcoms rely on stereotypes for their characters and situations. It's everywhere in comedy. When you live by stereotypes every day like that it can get you in trouble.

I don't expect a comic to be the same person on the stage as they are off the stage. Since this happened on the stage I'm not ready to condemn him. If we start getting reports from people he's worked with that he's had racial outbursts then I'll view it differently. If we hear that he won't hire landscapers or other helpers of certain races then we know he has problems. Right now it's just a tirade from a tanked comedy routine that flopped badly mixed with frustration and anger. There is nothing that clearly shows his personal views and feelings in that.

[JJuggle]

Frankly that comment about freedom of speech needing a limit offends me much much more than some tirade by a comic on stage. People who grow up in the US should know better. What are they teaching in civics class now?

How did half of high school students become comfortable with government censorship of media?
Thomas Lipscomb
863 words
4 February 2005
Chicago Sun-Times
49
English
Copyright (c) 2005 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.

A disturbing study released this week by the Knight Foundation of more than 100,000 students and 8,000 teachers and more than 500 administrators at 544 public and private high schools reveals a high level of misunderstanding of their First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and the press. If an informed electorate is one of the keys to a healthy democracy, America's schools are clearly failing their students and the nation.

Almost three out of four students said they took the First Amendment for granted or didn't have any particular opinion about it. Their general indifference and misunderstanding took tangible form in the belief of three out of four students that flag-burning was illegal and almost half believed the government had the right to censor the Internet. Once the First Amendment was read to them, one third of the students felt it went "too far" in granting free speech and one half thought that the government should have the right to approve news stories.

How did one half of American high school students become perfectly comfortable with government censorship of media? After all, the survey found that while 83 percent of the students believed that unpopular views should be expressed, 97 percent of their teachers and 99 percent of school principals understood that they should. As Hodding Carter III, the head of the Knight Foundation, points out, "The administrators from the previous generation are clearly better educated than the kids in the schools they are running."

But if the administrators know better, what are they actually doing about the problem? Some statistics from the study show nothing positive. One-fifth of the schools covered have no student publications at all, and 40 percent of those have eliminated them in the past five years. And the study shows a high correlation between the presence of student publications and student understanding of the First Amendment.

Mark Goodman is the executive director of the Student Press Law Center. His organization receives calls for advice and assistance from student publications under pressure from principals and administrators. In 1985, the Student Press Law Center received only 371 inquiries from student publishers and their faculty advisers nationwide. In 2003 these inquiries had spiraled up by almost a factor of 10, to 2,796.

According to Goodman one of the problems is that "today's administrators are more corporate CEOs managing huge budgets than educators." What is particularly troubling is that school administrators in the last five years are not only interfering with student publications more and more frequently, they are increasingly asking for prior approval of their content.

At the high school level covered by the Knight survey, courageous teachers who served as publication advisers have lost their jobs for resisting pressure from school administrators. Randy Swikle, a director of the Illinois Press Association Foundation who taught journalism for 36 years in the Johnsburg School District and served as a publication adviser, says, "Administrators preach democracy and practice hypocrisy. No wonder the kids get cynical."

The news gets worse at the collegiate level. Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education says, "At colleges, free speech is increasingly regarded as a nuisance to be granted only grudgingly, and college administrations use legal excuses to suppress opinions." While teachers bear the worst consequences at the high school level, students are heavily penalized at college. They are stigmatized, expelled, subjected to mandatory psychological counseling or forced to take "re-education" courses, with very little legal recourse.

Until recently, the legal excuse for this kind of thought policing was college administration references to conditions laid down by the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. But in July 2003, a letter of clarification was issued by that office which removes this excuse. Nonetheless, Lukianoff feels that "in the past year, I have seen the worst incidents in my career."

There have been hundreds of incidents of the theft and destruction of college newspapers by some groups, on campus and off, who feel they are expressing their freedom of speech by suppressing access to speech with which they disagree in the paper. Even the mayor of Berkeley, Calif., felt free to confiscate copies of a student newspaper that opposed his election. And less than a dozen have yet been arrested or even investigated and disciplined by any college administration to date.

What to do? This week, Margaret Spellings was sworn in to office "to protect and defend the Constitution" as the new secretary of education. The Department of Education's budget of more than $53 billion actually serves as a huge transfer bank of tens of billions of dollars going to all levels of education, including student loans. A Department of Education review with a possible delay of funding of educational institutions neglecting their responsibilities under the First Amendment could concentrate the minds of educational administrators wonderfully.

Thomas Lipscomb is a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.

Students have appallingly weak grasp of free speech

[JJuggle]

How did half of high school students become comfortable with government censorship of media?
Here is a link to the study, Future of the First Amendment: What America's High School Students Think About Their Freedoms (http://www.knightfdn.org/publications/futureoffirstamendment/FoFA_Key_Findings_final.pdf).

[leo]

This was his apology (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwBoVZh1ruQ&NR), though this version sounds more realistic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjY0THJNCII&NR).

if you can't take a joke about your race or religion, don't go to see a comedy act!
Who said they were not able to deal with a joke? Question remains how much joke was the joke.
Opposit if you can't deal with a hackler you shouldn't be doing stand-up comedy. This kind of counter is the cheapest of the cheapest, especially for someone with his kind of experience.

He may have said the N word, but it had a reason behind it.
Sure he had HIS reason, but obvious not a valid reason to the public.

He may have said the N word, but it had a reason behind it.
Do you think he had reason to insult a half audience because two hacklers?

That part has been conveniently edited out of the video that's running round the net right now. Does make you wonder.
To me it looks before the rage the camera owner had no reason to break rules about filming. And we tuned in the moment s/he found the camera and had it running. Or was there really a part removed?

[john_childs]

Here is a link to the study, Future of the First Amendment: What America's High School Students Think About Their Freedoms (http://www.knightfdn.org/publications/futureoffirstamendment/FoFA_Key_Findings_final.pdf).
I should know better than to ask such questions. I'm not going to like the answers. I have read of that study but have not actually read the study. I'll give it a read.

Following one of the related links I found this site Future Of The First Amendment (http://www.firstamendmentfuture.org/) which has more info about the survey and study.

With luck the US students here will read it too and learn something.

[ThisGuyIKnow]

Clearly? A tirade on stage by a comic does not clearly show the person has prejudiced views any more than a carpenter hitting his thumb with a hammer shows his religious views. If he acts like that out in real life, like say to a cab driver or other people he works with, then I'll begin to suspect he has some pent up racial views.


It is possible to be a closet racist and never act on or say anything about your internal beliefs, but still have the mindset. He wasn't just using the N-word. He said that fifty years ago they'd be hung upside down from trees, and that is where they belong. Saying that things were better when Blacks knew their place IS racist.

Besides that I've met the man and just being in his presence creates a huge sense of uneasiness.

On top of that from teh accoutns of people there the stuff that went on before the person started recording with the cell phone actually makes the incident worse not better.

[dudewithasock]

http://www.explosm.net/db/files/Comics/kbrainsucking0001.jpg

[ntappin]

It is possible to be a closet racist and never act on or say anything about your internal beliefs, but still have the mindset. He wasn't just using the N-word. He said that fifty years ago they'd be hung upside down from trees, and that is where they belong. Saying that things were better when Blacks knew their place IS racist.


Why can't we hope for the best in people. It is possible that he is a racist, it is also possible that you are one, or I am one or everyone on this board is a racist. In comedy making a racist joke doesn't have to make you a racist, the fact that the joke is so wrong and horrible can make it funny. I'm not saying his tirade was funny (although at parts I did laugh thinking, o man thats horrible, or no wonder he is getting slammed for this), but I'm saying that just because a comedian sais something that sounds racist, or someone sais something that sounds racist doesn't mean they think poorly of other races.

I would like to think that him aswell as all of us aren't racist, and until I actualy see them being racist towards someone in a natural environment without strange circumstances, I would like to think the better of them.

[UniBrier]

The Editorial Cartoonists chime in (http://cagle.com/news/Kramer/main.asp).

[iridemymuni]

if michael was black i dont think it would have been much of a problem

[ThisGuyIKnow]

if michael was black i dont think it would have been much of a problem

I don't think a black comic would ever insinuate taht lynchings made the world a better place.

[leo]

I don't think a black comic would ever insinuate taht lynchings made the world a better place.
But if that happen than it might be funnier than a non funny "joke".
Funnier in the sense of ridicolous.

I know a couple of Marrocan and Surinamese who do that in shows, but more to make a fool of those who do it for real... like KKK-Kramer.