http://news.bostonherald.com/columnists/view.bg?articleid=168325 said:
Time to Sein off on Kramer: Actor’s career goes up in smoke
Mel Gibson did his anti-Semitic tirade. Rush Limbaugh did an awful shake-like-a-bowlful-of-jelly Parkinson’s disease imitation. Fox-TV, until they canceled The O.J. Show yesterday, had murdered mothers in the cross hairs.
And now Seinfeld’s Kramer has done this crazed, five n-words in a row, “upside down with a (expletive deleted) fork up your (expletive deleted),” on-stage racist rant. It’s a mad dog, cringe-inducing, vitriol-thick meltdown that has to be seen to be believed.
What’s next? Seinfeld’s George Costanza attacking special needs toddlers?
And who could have predicted this in a million years from Kramer, beloved Kramer! Kramer with the Brillo hair sticking up and the two-tone brogue shoes and the loose shirt sticking out. Kramer who’d whirl into Jerry’s apartment in one careening yet seemless slide. Kramer, the weirdly lovable with the bubble baths, the Cuban cigars, the extra MSG on his Chinese food, the time he got even with the laundromat owner. “What’s the big deal? I’m just going to put a little concrete in the washing machine.” Kramer, the main delight and attraction, if not the star, of one of TV’s best shows ever, nine seasons, dozens of perect episodes.
“I don’t play Kramer,” actor Michael Richards once said of himself in an interview. “He plays me . . . It’s like I’m channeling him. I put on those shoes and the outfit and push my hair up a little, and he’s there.” But who is there, exactly? Was this stuff always percolating, unknown and unimagined? Will Kramer, like Mel, now blame the bottle, drugs, or Tourette’s Syndrome-in-extremis, and head for rehab?
“When I get drunk and do drugs I have sex with strangers and regret it in the morning,” says one local bachelor suspicious of the addiction-made-me-do-it defense. “I don’t turn into Kramer, the KKK years.” Meanwhile, like millions of Americans, here I am with my Seinfeld DVD collection, Seasons 1-6; with a dozen of the Channel 25 (7 p.m.) re-runs recorded on my DVR, right before “The Office,” right after “Sponge Bob.”
I can’t count the nights we’ve sat around relishing every Kramer raised eyebrow, every lunatic plot and plan, even if we’ve already seen it 10 times. But how can you ever revel in Kramer now? Or Seinfeld, period?
Perhaps this is the Seinfeld Curse, Part II. Part I: the show’s alumni, with the exception of Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Elaine), who won an Emmy this year, have not gone on to bigger and better things.
The Michael Richards Show lasted a mere eight episodes, from Oct. 24 to Dec. 19, 2000. Critics panned it; viewers stayed away. Since then Richards has appeared only in a made for TV movie, “David Copperfield,” an indie film I’ve never heard of, and, apparently, comedy clubs.
Seinfeld creator Larry David, star of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” based Kramer on a real person, Kenny Kramer, who gives tourists The Kramer Reality Tour of New York, $37.50. Stories are circulating now that a sympathetic David, routinely accused of racism by characters on his own show, will give Richards a chance to redeem himself on an episode he’ll write for Richards. Possible title: “Curb Your Racism.”
