Word: richardses
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Look to the cookie!" If only Michael Richards had remembered the advice of Jerry Seinfeld, rhapsodizing on his sitcom about the racial-harmony message of the black-and-white cookie. When Richards (Seinfeld's Kramer) called African-American hecklers in a comedy club "niggers" and joked about lynching them, it...
But the media have become so focused on the business side of show business--and the offense-contrition-comeback cycle has become so familiar--that the scandals immediately became dispassionate meta-stories about scandal management. After Gibson's outburst, we asked how rehab and apology could salvage his Mayan thriller...
That last is actually the more interesting question, though not for business reasons. After Richards' slur, the analysis emphasized how "lovable" his character Kramer was. But Seinfeld wasn't universally loved. The most popular show among white viewers, it was a distant runner-up among blacks, and minorities criticized it...
This is not to say that Seinfeld was racist. It satirized cultural tensions and p.c. conventions, usually hilariously, often uncomfortably, sometimes insensitively-- but it did confront them, unlike most sitcoms. It is too facile, however, to simply separate the work from the artist. The work is the artist; to the...
There is the risk, of course, that we let the racist off the hook by asking what his words say about ourselves. Richards seemed to be going for that onstage: "It shocks you, to see what's buried beneath you!" Yet he was not entirely wrong--there is ugliness buried...