‘Seinfeld’ Star Michael Richards Went Wild on Stage Again

Michael Richards has always been an unpredictable performer.

Critics and audiences alike singled that out as Richards’ brilliant skill, shaped across nine seasons and 180 episodes while starring as Cosmo Kramer on the iconic sitcom Seinfeld. Even co-stars Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus didn’t always know how Richards planned to play a scene, from entrances to exits with an inevitable pratfall in between. Richards likes to describe himself as “dionysian,” a word that translates to spontaneous, off-the-cuff, frenzied.

That unpredictability helped him win three Emmy Awards. But it also torched his career and sent him into an extended 17-year exodus. During an appearance at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles in November 2006, Richards was heckled by an audience member and he responded with an impromptu and explosive tirade, during which he repeatedly used the n-word. The incident, captured on camera by an audience member, went viral. After an initial apology organized by Seinfeld for Late Show With David Letterman, Richards retreated from public life. He spent years working on himself through “deep analysis” and spiritual reflection, traveling the world and reading. Richards emerged last year with a memoir, Entrances and Exits, and he made the publicity rounds in support of it by appearing in print and on television doing his first interviews in years.

On Wednesday night at Ventura Music Hall, he returned to the stage for the first time since 2006 by headlining Michael Richards: An Evening of Conversations, Questions and Answers. The mini-tour of California cities continues with stops in San Luis Obispo, Menlo Park, Monterey and Petaluma, and being that Ventura was first out of the gate, nobody knew what to expect. That included Richards and his moderator, respected veteran writer Todd Gold, who collaborated on Entrances and Exits.

“We have no idea what’s going to happen, which makes it really exciting,” Gold said in kicking off the event shortly after 8 p.m. He added that they didn’t rehearse any of the questions asked during the show’s first 90 minutes, saving the final 30 for audience questions which were submitted on slips of paper before showtime. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the unpredictability of such an event proved to be a fitting match for Richards who took the audience on a rollercoaster of emotions while Gold deftly drove the train.

Richards was at times thoughtful and quiet while recounting the racist tirade, its aftermath and the resulting exodus or praising peers like Sam Kinison, Andy Kaufman and George Carlin. Other times, he was wild, loud and rambunctious as he acted out scenes from Seinfeld or told colorful stories involving UFOs. At one point, while acting out an assignment he delivered in a public speaking class, he mimicked a seizure and threw himself to the floor convulsing in a showing that would have given Kramer a run for his money. Richards must’ve gotten out of his chair at least a dozen times throughout the course of the night, strutting across stage and commanding the room. The audience got up, too, responding in kind by delivering a standing ovation to start and one when it was all said and done.

“On our way over to this theater tonight, you were concerned about whether you could come off as your authentic self. How do you think you’ve done?” Gold asked as Richards responded, “Yeah, I’m close to the bone.”

Below are highlights from Michael Richards: A Night of Conversations, Questions and Answers.

On That Racist Tirade and Self-Imposed Exodus

After touching on Richards’ acting method of always coming up with a backstory for Kramer before he entered a scene even if it wasn’t on the page, Gold used the story as a segue to ask how it felt to revisit his backstory for the purposes of Entrances and Exits. Though the moderator meant backstory as in childhood, Richards went straight to controversy. “I was forced to revisit [my backstory] because 19 years ago, I was in a comedy club and I was a very naughty, naughty man,” he said of the 2006 incident. “That night, doing my act, I got interrupted, got heckled, and I really took it in the wrong way. It went really bad, and I said some awful things. Although I was trying to lift it into comedy, believe it or not, playing this idiot who’s a racist but I’m channeling all this goo-gah, which is what I do as a dionysian most of the time. I don’t really work with an act, I’m very loose on stage, very loosey-goosey. That goosey got me into some trouble.”

The viral debacle led to an extended break that wound up being about 17 years, he said. “I thought I would just back off and step into myself apart from show business, apart from the acting, apart from always being moved through character. How about being moved through myself? I took an exodus and I spent many, many years just looking very, very closely at mood, feeling, thought, dialoguing with mood, feeling and thought, paying attention to my dreams.”

While Richards revealed that he “took lots of calls” from people that wanted to put him into acting jobs, he declined all those opportunities. “Something else wanted me to stay alone, to be a reclusive. I spent a lot of time each morning in the Santa Monica mountains. I needed the sun. I stuck with the sun, with the earth. I felt that the order of nature supported me in gathering a kind of order within myself.”

“Terrified” of Tirade Aftermath, Richards Thought It Might Lead to Civil War

The response to what happened on the Laugh Factory stage was so intense that Richards said he was left “terrified,” thinking it might spiral out of control. “I thought the whole country was going to go into a Civil War because suddenly the guy who plays the beloved Kramer, this wacko, was on stage throwing around the n-word,” he explained, adding that when he drove home that night, he immediately pictured an American flag splitting in half based on a vision that he had in a dream years before. “What the hell is anger? Why did I let that heckler get me so angry? What in me is so susceptible, so susceptible to get so angry to say such things? It took me into the nature of anger and led me to looking around me to see how my humanity could be so, so angry.”

Jerry Seinfeld Is “Very Methodical”

Gold noted how Seinfeld wrote the book’s foreword, praising Richards as a “natural” and adding that the gift of doing the sitcom was how it offered the chance to be six inches from Richards. “What was Jerry like?” Gold asked, revealing he had never asked during in their years-long collaborations. “Oh, Jerry’s very methodical,” Richards explained. “I always called him an apollonic. He has a real sense of order. Everything has to be put in place before he takes a step forward. It’s astonishing, and it certainly works for the structure of the show. As a show runner, he really kept that going. ‘We need to be working within a place of order.’ I’m much more Dionysian. I’m very spontaneous, a lot of the stuff I’m going to do in front of camera, I don’t show it in rehearsal. I like to keep it fresh, particularly if I know it’s going to be a piece of physical comedy.” Because of the unpredictability of his physical comedy while playing Kramer, Richards said show directors were always prepared. “I had a fourth camera,” he said. “It was a three camera sitcom show but I had the luxury of a fourth camera so they always stayed wide on me.”

“If You Want Funny, Go With That Guy”

While Richards has talked and written about his Seinfeld audition before, it always seems relevant to revisit how his casting changed TV history. Looking back on the process, Richards dished that NBC executives “didn’t want me” and co-creator Larry David wasn’t immediately sold either. The actor was coming off the short-lived series Marblehead Manor, also on NBC, and “since that show had been canceled, the networks didn’t like to put an actor fresh from a canceled show into a new show,” he said. But he gave it his all during the audition. “I saw an office chair that had wheels on it, and I got in that instead so I could roll around. I got carried away with the wheels, doing some physical comedy. What I really wanted to do was just have fun because there wasn’t much I could do from what was in the script,” Richards recalled, adding that his goal became making Seinfeld laugh, which he accomplished. “Jerry’s laughing and that was the chemistry. I knew that when he laughed, I could play like that with him. Jerry knew right then.”

But he had to make it to the final audition, which was held at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Richards rode the elevator to emerge into a suite where NBC executives were waiting. He walked in and asked, “What are you people doing in my room?” Then he went to the bathroom, yelled out “come on!” before flushing the toilet and walking out with wet hands. Instead of playing it straight, he continued with the audition by reading his lines while doing a headstand on the table, knocking over a lamp and landing in a chair. Nailed it. “I hope I’m not sounding conceited,” Richards admitted. “But the head of the network was sitting there said, ‘Well, if you want funny, you go with that guy.’”

On Refusing to Watch Seinfeld (And Why That Changed)

Though it’s one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time — and routinely charts on Netflix’s streaming rankings all these years later — Richards refused to watch the show. “When I would watch ‘em, I would feel so disappointed,” he revealed. “There was so much to do. You only get one or two takes, and you got to move on. Television is the fastest medium possible. You put these shows together in four days. Four days, you put a show together. I just felt it was moving so fast, and so when I would see an episode, I’d say, ‘Oh, I could have done this,’ or I could have done that. I couldn’t bear to watch it and I wouldn’t watch it. I just did them and moved on.”

That attitude changed three years ago when he and Gold started putting the memoir together. “I said, ‘I’ve got to get familiar with these episodes. We’re writing about these episodes. I got to go into recall what it was like to make these episodes, each and every one of ’em.’ After so many years, I sat with my, at the time, 9-year-old son, and we watched the shows in sequence from beginning to end. You can do that Netflix, which is pretty cool. We spent two and a half weeks just watching Seinfeld episodes. I was so enjoying it because now I’m distant enough. I’m not in it. I could see them objectively. I was going, ‘Oh my god, this is, wow.’ I was so happy that I was a part of it because the ensemble is so just so rich. All these semi-regular actors, it was like the great second bench of the Chicago Bulls.”

His Favorite Scene He Nailed in One Take

During the Q&A portion of the evening, Richards was asked to name his favorite Seinfeld episode, and he cited “The Revenge,” the seventh episode of the show’s second season. Specifically, he loves a scene that finds Kramer teaming up with Jerry to get revenge on a laundromat owner (for allegedly stealing money from Jerry) by pouring cement into a washing machine. “That was the first show that I introduced some physical comedy,” he said. “I don’t say this out of conceit, but I did it in one take. I had it all visualized. The director was opposed to it. He says, ’It’s going to take too much time.’ They didn’t want to take the time to do physical comedy because you have to set it up, rehearse it, and it’s going to be way over there and we wouldn’t be able to play that to the audience. But I knew where the laughs were. I wanted to show that we can do this, we can get it done and we can move on very quickly. I had it all planned out. They even let me design the set. That was a delight for me.”

He also noted how he loved “The Statue,” the sixth episode from the same season. “That’s the first time that Kramer got to be a character, playing a character, and you could see how his imagination is romp. The physical comedy with that and then pouring cement into the washing machine. The physicality of those two episodes back to back, man, that was the birth of Kramer.”

“It’s Like Sitting in a New Escalade”

Playing Kramer looked like it could be hazardous to Richards’ health due to the sheer number of pratfalls over the years. But he was well-protected. “I had a pad kit. I had hip pads, knee pads, elbow pads. I had pads all over the place,” he said with a smile. He recalled a specific scene with actor Danny Woodburn (“such an open-hearted guy”) from “The Wait Out,” episode 21 from season 7. Woodburn played Mickey Abbott and they were meant to be rehearsing an acting scene but Kramer’s pants are too tight that he can’t sit down. Mickey races over and tackles Kramer. “I had a wonderful brace on all the way up to protect my spine,” Richards said. “It was like sitting in a new Escalade.”

Kramer Communicated With Richards About His Wardrobe Choices

Beyond back braces, Richards said he went to great lengths to find a wardrobe that fit Kramer’s vibe. “I’ll just say that the character talked to me. I felt like I was told to go to thrift shops,” he said, revealing that the character communicated directly to him. “Kramer, where do you get your clothes? Thrift shops. All the clothes he wears, that’s the reason why the pants are a little short because those are the clothes he’s always had for 20 years. It just so happened to turn out that it was rather hip.” Richards spent his summer hiatus by scouring the racks, at one point accumulating “over 90 shirts” for his character. “That stuff was all out of the early ’60s. I made a point of making sure that all those clothes were out of the early ’60s, never went into the ’50s.” Years later, a man approached him to say how much he loved his work on Seinfeld, claiming that he made $18 million by manufacturing shirts in the style of Kramer. “I said, ‘God, I should have been in on that.’ I didn’t think business wise, but it just turned out that those $1.50 shirts could be sold for a whole lot more.”

He Lit a Tie on Fire And Was Saved by Jay Leno

Richards and Gold repeatedly touched on the improvisation, the unpredictability of life, the “value of the irrational” and how it all adds color to one’s experience. Jumping off from that point, Richards recalled how he was on stage once and found himself moved to try something wildly unpredictable. “I didn’t really get the response I wanted,” he said in starting the story. “I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to sacrifice myself to the comedy gods. I’m going to light myself on fire.’ I put a flame to my tie and just stood there thinking, how am I going to get out of this? This is highly irrational. First of all, I wasn’t planning to light myself on fire, but I’m on fire now, and the next thing I know, the flames are coming up to my face.” Just then, Jay Leno jumped up on stage and doused him with water. “He turned to the audience and said something, and we got a huge laugh, huge, and I said, ‘Thank you, Jay. That’s our routine. We’ve been working on that all afternoon. The timing of that water was good but Jay, maybe a little bit earlier next time. I could feel the flames on my throat.’”

Watermelon Stand-Up Experiment Fell Flat

Richards talked about up being inspired by comedy greats, people like Andy Kaufman, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Sam Kinison and George Carlin. He spent time specifically praising Kaufman who also had an unpredictable style, evidenced by the time that he washed clothes and read a magazine while on stage in front of an audience. Richards felt he needed to experiment with an exercise of his own but the one he picked out turned out not to be that sweet. “I brought out a big watermelon and I just sat there,” he said. “I opened up the water, handed out slices of watermelon to people, and then I burped and I left.” The “big-time manager” he had at the time was not impressed. “He said, ‘Michael, I don’t know what you’re doing up there.’ I said, ‘I’m getting acquainted with the audience, that’s what I’m doing.’ He didn’t know what to do with that. Everybody was striving to get that six minutes on The Tonight Show and he said, ‘You don’t have anything I can do that with if you’re just eating watermelon.’”