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• Monday, November 20, 2006 04:05 PM

  Richards' tirade

  While I'm hardly defending his tirade, if you'd ever seen a stand-up go horribly wrong, and the stand-up knows it (nothing can be done if the comic thinks he's hysterical even when he's not), it can get ugly. Turning on the audience is the last resort, when the comic thinks if they can turn the audience's hate toward someone else, it won't be as bad for him. The racist thing - there's a fine line between comedy and offense. Don Rickles has been using racial slurs for 40 years, but no one really wants to ride him out of town. You get the feeling Rickles was doing it only to get a rise, not to jump off the Titanic that was his act. Of course, if you've ever met any stand-up or sketch comedians, you know those are the most needy, insecure, unbalanced performers - and that's saying something.

  Then again, maybe Richards was trying to emulate Larry David's early stand-up where he would verbally attack every member of the audience.

  And a couple of corrections from the previous letters- Michael Richards had been toiling in obscurity for years before Seinfeld, so his success didn't "come early" as someone pointed out.

  And the bit on "Fridays" with Andy Kaufman, Richards simply grabbed the cur cards and threw them in front of Kaufman, as if to say "just do the lines, and save the performance art for your club act." The person who charged Kaufman was a producer.

  —gaustinw Read gaustinw's other letters
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