‘Kramer’ is sorry for using the n-word

WASHINGTON DC: For almost 10 years between 1987 and 1997, Seinfeld was America’s top-rated sitcom, and Kramer, Jerry Seinfeld’s weird neighbour, its most beloved character.

With Seinfeld DVDs becoming a rage in the US since 2004, his character has remained one of the most memorable in American television history.

This week, all that came to an end when TMZ.com posted a video of Richards letting off a racial tirade at the West Hollywood outlet of Laugh Factory, a comedy club chain.

In an obvious reference to lynching of African Americans in the early to mid-20th century, Richards told an African American heckler during a stand-up comedy performance last week: “Fifty years ago, we’d have you upside-down with a f***g fork up you’re a**.” He then repeated several times: “He’s a nigger! Look, there’s a nigger!”

Richards then went on Monday on the Late Show with David Letterman to apologise, but it has not gone well with a nation that is still trying to completely let go off its racist past.

“I am deeply, deeply sorry... I am not a racist,” Richards told Letterman.

Frank McBride and Kyle Doss, the two men Richards targeted, said they never heckled, and were merely ordering drinks. Doss said on national television: “No, I think that apology was totally fake, it was forced. I feel like that was a career move. It wasn’t sincere.”

Columnist Eugene Robinson wrote in the Washington Post: “Richards’ heckler just happened to be black.... There was no racial content in the heckling. But something inside Richards was triggered, some hidden fail-safe switch, and he went immediately to race as if that were the reason the man was annoying him and thus an appropriate way to strike back.

He didn’t see the heckler as a man, he saw him as a black man — one who needed to be reminded that once upon a time he might have been lynched for his impertinence, and who needed to be put in his place with the most explosive word in the language.”