The Kramer in All of Us

By James Poniewozik

Look to the cookie!" If only Michael Richards had remembered the advice of Jerry Seinfeld, rhapsodizing on his sitcom about the racial-harmony message of the black-and-white cookie. When Richards (Seinfeld's Kramer) called African-American hecklers in a comedy club "niggers" and joked about lynching them, it capped a season of celebrity lunacy. Mel Gibson had his anti-Jewish tirade during a drunk-driving arrest; actor Isaiah Washington reportedly called a fellow Grey's Anatomy cast member a "faggot" during an argument on set. News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, apologized last week not for bigotry per se but for cynically ripping off the race-and-gender scab of the O.J. Simpson trial by offering Simpson a book deal and TV show to describe how he "hypothetically" would have butchered his wife and her friend.

All this followed an election whose lowlights were the macaca incident, an ad playing off miscegenation fears and a radio host mocking a disabled man. It's as if the U.S. were experiencing collective Tourette's, regurgitating decades of dutifully sublimated hate--Borat, with real people. As disturbing as the bigotry was the role of the people expressing it. Politicians and entertainers, after all, succeed by knowing our hearts and minds. We are, in a real way, implicated in their achievement and their disgrace. So you'd think this explosion of public ugliness might spur some kind of national soul searching. Did we somehow encourage their bigotry, by ignoring softer forms of it in our pop culture? Did they think on some level, conscious or not, that they spoke for us? Were they right?

But the media have become so focused on the business side of show business--and the offense-contrition-comeback cycle has become so familiar--that the scandals immediately became dispassionate meta-stories about scandal management. After Gibson's outburst, we asked how rehab and apology could salvage his Mayan thriller, Apocalypto. We didn't look so hard at how his bile reflected on the millions who loved The Passion of the Christ, with its hook-nosed, despicable Jews. About Richards, we asked, Did he seem sad enough on Letterman? What do p.r. experts advise? How will the incident affect Seinfeld reruns and DVDs?

That last is actually the more interesting question, though not for business reasons. After Richards' slur, the analysis emphasized how "lovable" his character Kramer was. But Seinfeld wasn't universally loved. The most popular show among white viewers, it was a distant runner-up among blacks, and minorities criticized it for having all white stars and portraying people of color as stereotypes or buffoons (the Johnnie Cochran--like lawyer; Babu, the Pakistani restaurateur). Did the critics have a point? It's going to be hard to look the same way, say, at the episode in which Kramer inadvertently dresses up like a pimp.

This is not to say that Seinfeld was racist. It satirized cultural tensions and p.c. conventions, usually hilariously, often uncomfortably, sometimes insensitively-- but it did confront them, unlike most sitcoms. It is too facile, however, to simply separate the work from the artist. The work is the artist; to the extent that we respond to it, it is us too. Liking a Mel Gibson movie (or a T.S. Eliot poem) does not make you an anti-Semite. But it does require that you ask just what you do and don't identify with in it. Apocalypto shows a rage against senseless war and bloodlust, but it also seems to revel in them, and it raises the question of when purity of belief can shade into intolerance. Borat is the funniest movie of the year, but it's reasonable to ask whether our culture has become so anti-p.c. that a racist comic can defend his rant, as Richards did, as "go[ing] into character."

There is the risk, of course, that we let the racist off the hook by asking what his words say about ourselves. Richards seemed to be going for that onstage: "It shocks you, to see what's buried beneath you!" Yet he was not entirely wrong--there is ugliness buried in people--and it's our responsibility as culture consumers to ask where he might be right. Some people swore off Seinfeld reruns after Richards' explosion. I say watch them again, and think about how the comically ugly characters reflect him, and you. You might find that looking at Seinfeld this way--learning, if not hugging--makes the humor deeper and maybe even funnier. Look to the cookie, indeed. But look to yourself too.