Kramer vs. Kramer

Masks

To view the YouTube video of Michael Richard’s x-rated, insane, racist tirade …
http://huffingtonpost.com/2006/11/20/kramer-actors-racist-t_n_34558.html

I’m not saying that everyone is like Michael Richards, the Seinfeld alumnus whose hideous meltdown at a Los Angeles comedy club was captured by a digital camera and soon posted on the Internet. But I am saying that as a society, we still haven’t purged ourselves of racial prejudices and animosities.

For those who missed it, Richards — who will always be known as Cosmo Kramer, Jerry Seinfeld’s indescribably weird neighbor — was performing at the Laugh Factory, a club in Hollywood, when a heckler in the audience began to intervene. There isn’t a comic alive, I would wager, who has never been heckled. Surely, a performer of Richards’ experience has faced rowdier interlopers than the one Friday night.

Who happened to be black.

Out of nowhere, Richards explodes. He screams at the man, and I mean screams, using the expletive ”N-word”. “He’s a (expletive)! He’s a (expletive)! He’s a (expletive)! A (expletive), look, there’s a (expletive)!”

He made no excuses for his inexcusable words, but he did tell viewers, “I’m not a racist.”

He could have fooled me. Just as Mel Gibson, who in his own ritual abject apology said he’s not an anti-Semite, sure had done a pretty good impersonation of one.

Excerpt from an article written for the Miami Herald by Eugene Robinson…to read in full, go to – MiamiHerald.com | 11/25/2006 | Kramer vs. Kramer


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