"Kramer's" Racist Tirade -- Caught on Tape

TMZ ^ | 11/20/06 | TMZ Staff

[torchthemummy]

Michael Richards exploded in anger as he performed at a famous L.A. comedy club last Friday, hurling racial epithets that left the crowd gasping, and TMZ has obtained exclusive video of the ugly incident.

[Defiant]

What you posted is correct, but it is a word of celtic origin that entered English.

Linguists now believe the original root to be the Gaelic craic, still used in Ireland (anglicized in spelling to crack) for "entertaining conversation." The English meaning of cracker as a braggart appears by Elizabethan times, as, for example, in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this . . . that deafes our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?"

New Georgia Encyclopedia

[dhs12345]

Typical. Quickest to get a person to shut up and censor them is call them a racist. Old tactic and typical from the cry wolf people.

It is wrong either way. No if-ands-or-buts!

And racism will continue until *BOTH* blacks *AND* whites think that it is wrong to use the n-bomb.

[Cagey]

By the way, it's SEINFELD, not STEINFELD.

MAN: Mr. Steinfeld?

JERRY: Seinfeld.

MAN: We're with the FBI. You wanna tell us about your cable hook-up?

JERRY: My cable hook-up? What about it?

MAN: It's been illegally installed, Mr. Steinfeld.

JERRY: It has? I've been out of town. How did you know?

(An agent leads Kramer out of the bedroom into the living room)

KRAMER: Jerry, I had to tell them. I had to. I had no choice. They were onto the scam from the very beginning.

MAN: You're in serious trouble, Mr. Steinfeld.

[weegee]

And then there is the coached foul mouthed antiChristian bigotry on display in this video clip...

The Coolest 8 Year Old In The World Talks About O'Reilly (Bring Your Own Barf Bag)

[Defiant]

You like to divert, don't you.

The "right to heckle" is not the issue here, nor is the right of a comedy club to remove an unruly patron. What is being discussed is the injection of race into the heckling by an audience member of a comic. If this discussion was about whether Kramer should have stopped his show and asked for the heckler to be removed, then those would all be points to discuss. For this discussion, though, they are irrelevant and indicative of a mindset by you to find a way to excuse racist behavior, or nitpick the critics of it.

[go-dubya-04]

I'm not trying to get you to shut-up; just the opposite - "All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing."
In this case, you still cannot stand up and call something wrong without adding a caveat. There has to be a reason for that. I just don't think you are willing to look into your heart and objectively ask yourself why that is.

[vetvetdoug]

I don't see the problem of Richard's tirade. What happened to Free Speech...let his visitors to the comedy club make their decisions on whether to show up or not. I'd bet a nickel to fifty that blacks make up less than 5% of the take and the great majority of the visitors are white. Richards could make a good living without black visitors. I don't support Rock or Jackson because of their racist attitudes toward whites.

[weegee]

Al Franken wrote a book entitled "Rush Limbaugh is a Big FAT Idiot" and had no backlash for using the word FAT.

Depends on who the target of the criticism is and who is using it. PC is about thoughtcrime. It serves to stifle free speech.

There is NO protected class of individual who can throw around the N-word. All are GUILTY.

[weegee]

You are the one who said he was delegitimizing their right to speak out at the comedy club. They were not the entertainer and they were to shut up or be tossed out on their asses. They did not. Neither did the club owner.

Failing that there was a continuation of the lapse of civility that the AUDIENCE had brought to the show with the outbursts.

[weegee]

There is an old tradition of comedians to go for the jugular when dealing with rude patrons. Some will even prod the audience with attacks (like Don Rickles and Rudy Ray Moore).

Doesn't mean what he was saying was either funny or appropriate. But where do you draw that line? If he had called a noisy woman a "b*t*h" would it have made headlines?

[Leftism is Mentally Deranged]

His career is over. But why do I think that the media won't have so much of a frenzy over this as they did over Mel Gibson?
(Gibson = Catholic)

[PghBaldy]

OK- what Kramer said was racist. How about Oprah? TMZ doesn't think so:

Oprah Lords Over White Folk, Talks Poop on XM And then Oprah pointed out that now that she's Oprah, she has "all these white people" working for her, and that in fact there's only one black person on the staff. Way to turn the tables, girl.

Finally -- and this was just in the first fifteen minutes -- Oprah moved onto her most recent favorite topic, excrement.

http://www.tmz.com/2006/09/25/oprah-lords-over-white-folk-talks-poop-on-xm/

[kabar]

It was corrected from the same source that I originally heard that story from...hotair.com. But you're welcome not to believe them, if you wish.

Click on the link and decide for yourself. Just remember the context and the fact that the Ford camp pulled the race card on the RNC ad. I listened to it six times and it sounded like cracker to me.

Hot air link

[ConservaTexan]

Speechless.

[PghBaldy]

I watched it and heard it - sounded like cracker to me.

[Defiant]

Still diverting. Tell me if you can agree with the statement below, and then we can talk about what the club owner should have done, although I don't really care, because it is a private club, and the club owner can do whatever he/she wants:

"Michael Richards' reaction, to attack a heckler based on his race, was wrong and racist."

Or do you think his response was reasonable and not indicative of anything troubling about him?

[dhs12345]

First, I apologize. Like you thinking that I am a racist, I have ideas of my own about you that are probably not true. I react this way to liberals and shouldn't react this way to a fellow freeper.

My reaction comes from being exposed to a society that automatically assumes I am racist because I am white. Like in your previous post. I think you were suggesting that I am racist.

All I am saying is that the "emperor isn't wearing any clothes." And I am suggesting that it using the n-word really isn't that bad if blacks use it profusely themselves.

And the two comedians that I saw used it profusely. And not in the same context as Richard Prior, whom I loved.

[weegee]

We are even disparaged for calling ANSWER Communists. Doesn't matter when we show the financial ties between CPUSA and ANSWER. "Communist" is considered an "epithet" that is out of bounds.

Some people may resort to the n word after being repeatedly told "don't say it, don't say it" "don't think it, don't think it". Subconsciously they become more aware of "the word". Plants a seed that may one day bloom.

I've heard that women really respond badly to hearing the C word but I haven't seen them respond as such.

What Richards said was designed to put the hecklers in their place as AUDIENCE members, not as black people. Did he go off on any other black members of the audience? Did he lash out the first time they said something out of turn or after repeated interruptions?

With a ban on cameras and recording devices at concert halls and movies, I can only figure that the pat down and metal detectors will soon be coming to the comedy clubs too.

[Silly]

Michael, please call me. We need to talk.

-- Your friend, Ted Danson

[ConservativeMan55]

bttt