I'm starting to feel sorry for Michael Richards.
The first time I heard about the incident at the Laugh Factory, I figured that he'd done something stupid on stage and that he was receiving the appropriate quantity of grief for it. I still think he did something stupid but I think the grief is expanding, all out of proportion. People are lumping him in with O.J. Simpson, drawing some sort of equivalency because they were both in the news on the same day. No doubt both were irrational with anger when they committed their sins…but stabbing two human beings to death strikes me as a wee bit worse than offending many more in a comedy club. Some of the offended have now engaged Gloria Allred to represent them in what seems like a pretty naked attempt to wring some dollars out of Mr. Richards. I would guess someone has looked up how much he made off his years on Seinfeld and guessed what percentage of the DVD moola is going to him, and figured he can afford to write a large check.
Allred is an attorney who has occasionally championed good and noble causes…but her prime motive always seems to be to get on TV and to try and shame someone into paying off her client(s). It's Justice, not in a court of law but by Press Conference. As I understand it, she isn't threatening — yet — to sue Richards, perhaps because she hasn't figured out yet what to sue him for. But she was on the news this afternoon demanding that Richards meet with her and her clients in the presence of a retired judge who would be hired to determine a sum of cash that the Seinfeld star should fork over by way of apology. In his appearance the other night on the Letterman show, Richards spoke of trying to control certain rages within him. I'm guessing that when he heard about Allred's demand, there was a lot more rage to control.
I'm even getting mad at her. Because of this woman, I'm sitting here, sympathizing with a man who got on a stage the other night and spewed racist crap to the point of making the audience walk out on him. The best possible interpretation you can make of Richards's rant is that he was high on something, enormously unprofessional and quite inept at handling his audience and his anger. That's the best. The worst would have something to do with having some sort of serious emotional problem and/or actually being a racist swine. Since I wasn't there and I don't know the guy, I'm not qualified to say that the worst applies. But he was certainly a jerk on stage and the proper penalty for that is for the public to stop paying to see you on stage. Anything beyond that strikes me as cruel and unusual punishment.