JOLLY DAYS

NYT Does Kramer

I've been thinking of canceling my subscription to the NY Times and I'm not sure if I want to do it because the Times has become watery and irrelevant (too late, too predictable), or I just don't like the news — it's been unrelentingly depressing, and I can blame it on the Times — the way newscasters blame the weatherman for bad weather.

I know for sure there is a conventional mentality that oozes out of the Times, especially in the weekend editions — it goes from weekday fairly smart to weekend smugly careerist. I know I've felt skeptical of NY Times slants, particularly about Israel and NYT political advocacy — especially the often clueless editorial page writers. When Howell Raines was Executive Editor the bias was less under the radar than now under Bill Keller, but it is still there.

Whatever the reason, the NYT coverage of the Michael Richards' meltdown made me appreciate the ungainly Times beast again. The Times is so large, has such a wide scope, so many bright reporters, that it can pull you back in.

First, in an AP article carried by the Times there is a surprise — Richards' “crisis expert” said that his client had uttered anti-Semitic comments on another occasion — he wasn't offering this as an excuse (equal opportunity offender), he was responding to earlier criticism of his client:

As for reports that Richards shouted out anti-Semitic remarks during another standup comedy routine in April, Rubenstein confirmed his client did, but that he was only role-playing.

''He's Jewish. He's not anti-Semitic at all. He was role-playing, he was playing a part. He did use inappropriate language, but he doesn't have any anti-Semitic feelings whatsoever,'' Rubenstein said.

The role playing comment is interesting because in the Times, Viriginia Heffernan wrote:

“You know,” Mr. Richards said at one point, seeming to address Mr. Letterman directly, “I’m a performer. I push the envelope. I work in a very uncontrolled manner onstage. I do a lot of free-association” — he slurred the word a bit — “and spontaneous. I go into character.”

That fairly simple point seemed, in the delivery, important. In the Laugh Factory clip, which was cut, framed and semiliterately subtitled by AOL’s entertainment site, TMZ.com, Mr. Richards begins by saying, “Shut up! Fifty years ago …” and then the material becomes unpublishable. But viewed with the possibility in mind that he’s creating characters, it’s easy to see a trace of parody in the way he hams up his racist word, shaking his fist like the leader of a lynch mob.

As I had written after hearing Richards' commentary on the Seinfeld DVDs, Michael Richards is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. His instinctual approach to performance might plausibly have had some confused motive — the creation of a racist “character” — meant to be mocked. But really, “confused” is the operative word — if that was the driving force, he needed to be more articulate after his meltdown than he apparently can be, and no matter what explanation he offered for his over-the-top performance, it was simply unacceptable under any circumstance.

Richards is a confused guy — a talented physical comedian, but severely limited in that very special way performers make evident nearly everyday in the media. Yet another supporting example of Charles Barkley's remark, “I'm not a role model.” The bottom line though is that the references in Richards' rant, not only the incendiary epithets, but the ideas themselves — references to lynching — are so repellent that the only group that can truly forgive him is the very African-American community that he so grievously attacked.

To finish off about the Times' coverage, here is a link to an article by the reliable Bill Carter, in an unusually clear and accurate report on Richards' appearance on Letterman — which I watched with horrified fascination — it was raw TV. The article clarified, at least partly, why the Letterman audience was intermittently laughing — they had not heard about the incident yet and thought Richards' appearance was a bit.

Indeed, during the first part of Mr. Richards’s comments, even though he was clearly distraught and expressing abject regret, some of the audience reacted with laughter, until Mr. Seinfeld gently mentioned that the interview was not meant to be funny.

FWIW, it appeared to me that Richards was sincere — presenting as a bewildered child, shocked he had brought down the wrath of the adults. Seinfeld was impressive, doing all he could to help his friend.