Michael Richards visited The View today and revisited the 2006 racist comedy club outburst that led to a decades-long withdrawal from the public eye.
Greeted with a warm “Welcome back, man,” by old friend and View moderator Whoopi Goldberg, Richards, promoting his new memoir Entrances and Exits, and the panelists wasted little time before addressing the still-hot topic.
Co-host Sunny Hostin broached the subject: “Let me just start by saying I don’t believe in cancel culture, I believe in consequence culture, and you’ve paid a lot of consequences.” She then asked what he was thinking at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles in 2006 when he responded to a Black heckler with a repeated use of the n-word. “Well, I’m on stage with a microphone in my hand,” Richards said, “doing an act, breaking in material, it’s late at night, and a man in the audience made an announcement that I’m not funny, he doesn’t think I’m very funny. “First,” he continued, “I must say, look, I’m not a normal man.
A lot of eccentricity going on in my kind of comedy. I could never have created a character like Kramer without being slightly touched.
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