Will Michael Richards Pay For Slurs?

The Michael Richards situation is unfortunate. While doing a set at a Los Angeles comedy club, he launched into a tirade against some African-American audience members who were heckling him. It was videotaped and he's since had to do a LOT of damage control.

But I'm not sure which part is more unfortunate, the stupidity of Richards or the fact that these audience members are now acting like the victims of an unprovoked attack and seeking cash.

The audience members have hired Los Angeles civil rights attorney, Gloria Allred, and a meeting between Richards and the audience members has been set. Among the conditions of the meeting will be the participation of a retired judge as a mediator who may suggest a cash payment from Richards to the four to compensate them for the pain and suffering his tirade caused them.

Now I'm not going to try to justify in any way shape or form what Michael Richards said. Furthermore, having been on the stand-up comedy stage and having dealt with hecklers myself, I will say that even if he'd just laid into them in a racially non-specific way, losing it and showing anger like that is just unprofessional. You need to be able to disarm and shut-up the hecklers without going into a rage.

That said, just because comedians need to be prepared to deal with hecklers and need to do so in a much better way, that doesn't mean that heckling is an acceptable behavior. These people were being jackasses, they were being rude, insulting, and inflicting pain on Richards. We can say that, as a professional, he should have been thicker-skinned and dealt with it better, but we also have to accept that the audience members he laid into knowingly acted in a way that would cause him distress.

Now, in this situation, him making a cash payment to them is bogus in two ways.

First, they don't actually have a legal cause of action. Unless the person you're suing has some actual power over you (like a cop or your boss), hurting your feelings with racial insults just doesn't meet the legal standard of an actionable harm. If this was just some poor dumbass with no assets, do you think Gloria Allred would have gotten involved or the subject of cash payments would even be on the table? No freakin' way.

Allred is trying to take advantage of the public's sense of moral outrage to extort cash from Richards. Yes, I said "extort." If she tried to take this to court, she'd have a near-impossible case for damages. So she's attempting to try this case in the press, where she can completely ignore the law, and settle it in a forum where the law isn't a factor. She's no better than a mafioso running a protection racket.

Second, it's just morally and ethically wrong for these people to profit from being jackasses. They were not sitting there, minding their own business, and got attacked for no reason. They "started it". The fact that they started it doesn't make what Richards did less wrong, but it does make them looking to get money for it a hell of a lot more wrong. In my mind, them winning the "I acted like a jackass" lottery is wrong. And two wrongs do not make a right.

Think about it, some dumbass comedian saying that a hundred years ago you'd have been upside down with a fork up your ass... more or less painful than your girlfriend/boyfriend dumping you? More or less painful than them dumping you and telling you that you're fat and a lousy lay? Most adults have gone through more emotionally painful incidents in their life that they did less to provoke, and they never got a cent, much less an apology.

For these audience members to actually get money goes beyond the bounds of ridiculous into the realm of patently absurd. Yes, they are owed an apology, but money??? No. No. And no again.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Dangerous Thoughts, Society.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.