I have spent much of the past few days trying to come to terms with what I think about the video footage of Michael “Kramer” Richards’s spectacularly self-destructive attack on some black hecklers at a stand-up gig.
It’s shocking, embarrassing and awful in every degree – not just because of what he is saying, but because we are almost certainly witnessing the final moments of a man’s career. His attempts to apologise on The David Letterman Show just add to the agony.
The uncomfortable sniggering of the audience, unaccustomed as they are to seeing funny-man Kramer trying to be serious merely increase the pitiful nature of this self-inflicted tragedy.
Although I would make no attempt to defend him for the things he said on stage, which are brutal, ugly and seemingly devoid of irony, as a comedian I do empathise with him a little. These awful thoughts must have come from somewhere within him, but I don’t believe he is genuinely racist.
All comedians have had those gigs where things aren’t going your way and they are prepared to try anything to get the audience back. A persistent heckler can really make things difficult for you and attack is often the best form of defence. Sometimes you need to shock an audience back on side. Sometimes you find you are just digging yourself in deeper, what you’re saying isn’t funny, the magic doesn’t come. You make things worse. You go home and cry yourself to sleep. Sometimes though a barrage of filth and ugliness will work. It’s a fine balance and you’re freewheeling and making it up as you go along. Not much thought goes into it. It’s an almost trance-like state. Sometimes you are surprised at your own articulacy. Sometimes you despair that your brain and mouth are not connected. As often as not you do not believe what you are saying. For example at one gig a few years ago I started on a digression about how I wanted fuck the skeleton of Pocahontas (who was buried locally) in the eye socket. This is not something I would really want to do (and anyone who says it is is lying). On this occasion the audience went with my flight of fancy, baying at me to push things even further. But in the cold light of day, out of context, written down in black and white, it looks a little bleak to say the least.
Other times it has gone badly wrong. In Edinburgh this year I did a stand up spot at the prestigious “Best of the Fest”. It was a fortnight into the Fringe and I was tired and emotional. I had had a bad day: a couple of run ins with aggressive punters, a mix up over another gig I had been looking forward to doing, it was raining….
I had also been drinking that night. I was in a dark mood. The comic before me, Rhys Darby blew the room apart with a fantastic act involving impressions of guns and robots. It was truly brilliant and it electrified the audience and I knew it would be difficult to follow. I managed 14 unexceptional minutes of my contracted 15. It was late on a Friday night and the audience did not want my erudite observations, especially after the supreme silliness of Rhys’s triumphant act.
I had nearly got through my set when a couple of lads started a slow hand-clap. Suddenly all the frustrations of the day bubbled to the surface and I launched into a vitriolic attack. It’s something I have done in the past, with a degree of success and many a moribund gig has been turned round by a flash of angry passion. But tonight I was not in control, I was in a genuine, drunken, emotional fury. I started telling the men that if they weren’t so stupid they would have understood my act. Already I was looking pompous and arrogant. So I tried to push it further hoping that would rescue me. “I’m sorry I can’t do impressions of robots like Rhys,” I told them, then made a pathetic attempt to do so. This got a laugh. I stupidly didn’t leave it there. “You’re so thick that that’s all you can understand to laugh at: stupid noises. You can’t concentrate on actual words and sentences. You can only laugh at someone making sounds. How pathetic is that?” It was meant to be an attack on the hecklers, but of course as I went on it sounded like I was criticising the previous act. An act that had brought the house down, whereas my routine would have caused no structural damage to the little pig’s straw dwelling. In my head I was thinking that people would understand this was a wilfully self destructive act, designed to ironically mock my own failure. But of course they didn’t understand this. Mainly because that irony was only apparent in my alcohol addled brain.
Yet I didn’t mean the things I was saying. It was merely a desperate and misguided attempt to save myself. And though what Richards has done is much, much worse, I think it came from the same impetus. He set off down a road, hoping that there was going to be some way out of it at the other end. Yet along the way he found no punchline. You can see him struggling to come up with a justification, but slowly it dawns on him that there isn’t one. Finally he can only leave the stage in humiliation.
It’s all too tragic, but it’s a tragedy I and most comedians can at least partially understand.
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