Wednesday, November 22, 2006

A Tuesday Evening Commentary

I'm starting to feel sorry for Michael Richards.

The first time I heard about the incident at the Laugh Factory, I figured that he'd done something stupid on stage and that he was receiving the appropriate quantity of grief for it. I still think he did something stupid but I think the grief is expanding, all out of proportion. People are lumping him in with O.J. Simpson, drawing some sort of equivalency because they were both in the news on the same day. No doubt both were irrational with anger when they committed their sins...but stabbing two human beings to death strikes me as a wee bit worse than offending many more in a comedy club. Some of the offended have now engaged Gloria Allred to represent them in what seems like a pretty naked attempt to wring some dollars out of Mr. Richards. I would guess someone has looked up how much he made off his years on Seinfeld and guessed what percentage of the DVD moola is going to him, and figured he can afford to write a large check.

Allred is an attorney who has occasionally championed good and noble causes...but her prime motive always seems to be to get on TV and to try and shame someone into paying off her client(s). It's Justice, not in a court of law but by Press Conference. As I understand it, she isn't threatening — yet — to sue Richards, perhaps because she hasn't figured out yet what to sue him for. But she was on the news this afternoon demanding that Richards meet with her and her clients in the presence of a retired judge who would be hired to determine a sum of cash that the Seinfeld star should fork over by way of apology. In his appearance the other night on the Letterman show, Richards spoke of trying to control certain rages within him. I'm guessing that when he heard about Allred's demand, there was a lot more rage to control.

I'm even getting mad at her. Because of this woman, I'm sitting here, sympathizing with a man who got on a stage the other night and spewed racist crap to the point of making the audience walk out on him. The best possible interpretation you can make of Richards's rant is that he was high on something, enormously unprofessional and quite inept at handling his audience and his anger. That's the best. The worst would have something to do with having some sort of serious emotional problem and/or actually being a racist swine. Since I wasn't there and I don't know the guy, I'm not qualified to say that the worst applies. But he was certainly a jerk on stage and the proper penalty for that is for the public to stop paying to see you on stage. Anything beyond that strikes me as cruel and unusual punishment.

• Posted at 10:50 PM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

Reader Tom Wolper writes with an interesting question about the whole Michael Richards matter...

I understand the public interest about Richards's response to hecklers attracts attention because it touches nerves about race. But there is a secondary issue which I am curious about and nobody is discussing. Since you have friends in standup and I'm sure many of your blog readers appreciate standup comedy, I'd like to know what you think or newsfromme readers think about an audience member recording a live performance, editing it, and posting it publicly. i don't have any Improv stubs handy so I don't know if recording is explicitly prohibited in writing. On a pro sports ticket stub I see: "...and by use of this ticket agrees the holder will not transmit or aid in transmitting any description, account, picture or reproduction of the Baseball Game to which this ticket admits him."

Are comics, in general, worried about bootlegs of their performances and are they worried about edgy or blue material being edited by an audience member to remove context, then being posted on the Internet?

Yes, comics are worried about bootlegs of their performance...and for just about every possible reason. Theft of material is a biggie. Back when I was hanging around The Comedy Store a lot, you practically took your life in your hands if you pulled out a note pad to jot down a phone number. A bouncer-type might come over to you and demand to see what you'd written because they knew the comics would get ticked off if they weren't policing that kind of thing. I've seen performers on stage stop in the middle of a set because they thought someone had a tape recorder.

So they're worried about that, they're worried about plain, old-fashioned bootlegging...and now, in the era of YouTube, I'm sure they're worried about material being posted on the 'net to make them look bad. If they weren't before the Richards controversy, they are now. In the past, some clubs have been rather lax about posting rules or printing them on tickets but this may cause them to get somewhat more strict, not only in terms of proclaiming the policy but enforcing it, as well. We may even see public venues that make you check any cellphones that has a camera. The folks who recorded the Michael Richards clip and posted it were probably breaking some Laugh Factory rule — and possibly a larger issue of copyright — but I doubt anyone is going to go after them about it.

The managers of The Laugh Factory, by the way, have posted this statement on their website saying, among other things, that Richards is no longer welcome on their stage. I'm not quite sure what the point would have been of having Richards apologize to Saturday night's audience for offending Friday night's audience but, hey, there are a lot of things in this world I don't understand. I think I'd be more impressed if The Laugh Factory apologized for the parking situation up there on a Friday night. If you've ever tried it, you know why things could get volatile in that room.

• Posted at 1:28 PM · LINK

Today's Political Comment

It amazes me — and maybe it shouldn't by now — that the "talking heads" discussing the Iraq War on our teevees can make predictions and then aren't held to any standard of results. You can be proven dead wrong about everything and still get a lot of air time. You can also still hold public office and even get a medal from George W. Bush...but that's a different problem. You'd just think that with all the people in this country who'd love to get on C-Span and the news channels to give their views, those who achieve that exalted position would be shoved aside if they're consistently off. I mean, you wouldn't keep going to a doctor whose track record was as bad as William Kristol's...but somehow, there's always a place for him on the Sunday morning news programs.

One guy who's gotten all or almost all of it right about Iraq is Scott Ritter, who is invariably identified as a "former weapons inspector." When Bush apologists say, of the fact that no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq, "Everyone got that wrong," they're omitting Ritter, who was among the few who got it right. You'd think there'd be more interest in what he has to say now about Iran...not that he or anyone is infallible but come on. If two guys predict all the football scores and one guy gets most of 'em right and the other gets most of 'em wrong, who are you going to listen to for next weekend? Here's a link to a video interview with Ritter talking about Iran.

• Posted at 9:35 AM · LINK

Poll Position

The Wall Street Journal has assembled some data and some confusing charts to see how the various major pollsters did in forecasting the Senate races just concluded. Answer: Not too well. Some of them were wildly off with their predictions, which we should all keep in mind the next time those same pollsters are telling us who's going to win.

• Posted at 9:11 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

We need a cartoon here, I think. This weblog doesn't feel right without a cartoon on it once in a while. This is A Day at the Zoo, a Warner Brothers cartoon directed by Tex Avery and released on March 11, 1939. There are no credits on this print but if there were, they'd say that the animation was done by Rollin Hamilton and that the story was by Robert Clampett and Melvin Millar. Clampett was already directing his own cartoons by this time and I have no idea why he received story credit on a Tex Avery cartoon. Voices were by Mel Blanc and Dave Weber, with Gil Warren as the narrator. Dave Weber, who also went by the name of Danny Webb, was the guy they usually called in when they needed a celebrity voice impersonation in those days.

That's about all you need to know right now. Enjoy the cartoon.

• Posted at 12:12 AM · LINK