Cosmo Goes Psycho

Have you ever seen the movie A Face in the Crowd? In it, a hillbilly singer, “Lonesome” Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith, becomes an overnight sensation, and becomes so famous and powerful that he starts to become a political figure. The people closest to him are increasingly disturbed by this, since they know he’s a really, really nasty guy behind the good-ol’-boy facade. (This isn’t Sheriff Taylor of Mayberry.) One of them finally brings him down by leaving a microphone on when the singer is joking around with his pals during a live broadcast, letting the entire nation know what a creep the singer is.

Which brings me to Michael Richards and his crazy tirade against a couple of hecklers at a comedy club. Richards isn’t anywhere near the cultural icon that the fictional Rhodes was in A Face in the Crowd, or even in the same class as Mel Gibson when he went off on his anti-semitic rant against an LAPD officer.

But he was caught on video, which makes this the most remarkable celebrity self-immolation I can recall.

Here‘s his explanation:

Michael Richards said Monday he spewed racial epithets during a stand-up comedy routine because he lost his cool while being heckled and not because he’s a bigot.

“For me to be at a comedy club and flip out and say this crap, I’m deeply, deeply sorry,” the former Seinfeld co-star said during a satellite appearance for David Letterman’s Late Show in New York.

“I’m not a racist. That’s what’s so insane about this,” Richards said, his tone becoming angry and frustrated as he defended himself. A clip from the show played on CBS before the Late Show aired Monday night.

Richards described himself as going into “a rage” over the two audience members who interrupted his act Friday at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood. Richards responded to the black hecklers with repeated use of the “n word” and profanities.

Later in the story you get a slightly better explanation from a veteran stand-up:

Comedian George Lopez told Los Angeles television station KTLA that he thought Richards’ lack of stand-up experience may have been a factor.

“The question is you have an actor who is trying to be a comedian who doesn’t know what to do when an audience is disruptive,” Lopez said. “He’s an actor whose show has been off the air, he shouldn’t ever be on a stand-up gig.”

Speaking as someone who tried to do stand-up in the early ’80s, I think this makes a lot of sense. Stand-up is much harder than it looks. I don’t say that because I was bad at it. I say that because it’s true. You’re up there by yourself in front of a nightclub audience that’s completely unpredictable. Sometimes you’ll get a great crowd that’s with you from the first syllable, and sometimes you find yourself facing people who’ve had too much to drink and couldn’t pay attention to your routine if they wanted to. Sometimes you get audience members who try to help your routine by throwing out comments. And sometimes you get people who just want to screw with you.

Veteran comedians have a couple of lines that quickly put hecklers and “helpers” in their place. One of the guys I performed with used a line (which I’m sure wasn’t original) that went something like this:

Hey, do I go to hotel rooms and sit on the edge of the bed and talk while you’re working?

There was a lot of racial back-and-forth between the black and white comedians in the little clubs where I performed. The black guys, inevitably, were better at it than the white guys. One of my favorite bits was used by a black guy, and went something like this:

This year I want to have a white Christmas. I’m not talking about snow. I want to have a honky Christmas. “Honey, throw another Mercedes on the fire.”

The last line was delivered in a sweet “husband” voice, and always cracked up the audience. I think I laughed the first 20 times I heard it.

Offstage, though, there was no racial talk. Maybe I’ve whitewashed my memories, but I can’t recall any tension at all. Most of the time we all went our separate ways after the shows, but sometimes we hung out together, and I just can’t remember there being any kind of unease. And this was in St. Louis, a very segregated city, at a time when the busing controversy made racial divisions a front-page issue.

That’s why it’s hard for me to believe that a guy like Richards, working for decades in L.A. as an actor, would have genuinely deep-seated animosity toward African-Americans. It’d be damned hard to work in the entertainment business if you did. And more than that, working with fellow entertainers (or, in my case, aspiring entertainers) tends to take the edge off whatever racial attitudes you might’ve had before going into show business. If there’s any difference between a white guy trying to tell jokes to drunken strangers and a black guy trying to do the same, I sure never saw it.

Which makes Richards’ tirade inexplicable, and makes me think George Lopez has the best take: If you’re in front of an audience because you’re famous for doing something else, and you have no experience dealing with a disruptive situation that arises in comedy clubs no matter who you are, and you haven’t prepared for disruptive situations, then you might just say the first thing that pops into your head. Even if it’s a thought you’d never have in any other situation in your life.

I’m not justifying what Richards said. I’m just trying to understand it.

Tags: Tags: society