November 21, 2006

From: Elliot Forget, senior partner, Dodge & Retreat Consulting
To: Michael Richards
Re: Your follow-up apology

Mr. Richards,

In response to your phone call today expressing a desire for “a broader, more populist response to the unfortunate incident,” I have drafted the following. We suggest releasing it to the media at 10 a.m. Wednesday so that its broadcast on Thanksgiving Eve and publication on Thanksgiving Day will draw greater exposure at a time of year when media are desperate for news.

We propose releasing the following in your name:

I regret not presenting a fuller description and historical context of my actions during my performance at the Laugh Factory. What I did was intended to mimic a cutting-edge and courageous routine that Lenny Bruce performed in the early 1960s and wrote about. Lennie, always a major influence of mine in the way my "Kramer" character on “Seinfeld” interacted with minorities, decided to destroy the N-word by overinflating it—repeating it over and over again until it lost its capacity to sting.

Let me recall Lenny's routine for you fully:

"Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? 'Are there any niggers here tonight?' I know there's one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let's see, there's two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kike. And there's another kike— that's two kikes and three niggers. And there's a spic. Right? Hmm? There's another spic. Ooh, there's a wop; there's a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there's three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there's one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kikes here, do I hear five kikes? I got five kikes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kikes, three guineas, and one wop.

Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: If President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he'd just say 'nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger' to every nigger he saw, 'boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie,' 'nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger' 'til nigger didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school."

This was what my tirade at the Laugh Factory was supposed to conjure. I realized, as I accidentally dropped the first so-called N-bomb, that a vast opportunity was opening up to me—that what Lenny did in the early 1960s, I could do at this moment. I could defuse this horrible verbal stain. I could rob it of its power to demean and hurt.

Apparently we live in a different world now because the audience and media reaction created a backlash, forcing me to issue a transparent apology on the Letterman Show, an apology that failed—and this was my fault—to show the historical roots of what was dismissed by too many people as a tirade by a racist. And I am not a racist. I am an artist with a conscience. I’m sure Lenny would agree. I am an artist who seeks only to be judged, as Doctor King said, by the content of my character.