It’s fairly normal for stand-up comic to feel moments of awkwardness. But when it’s awkwardness for reasons other than failed jokes, it starts to get interesting.

Michael Richards, more famously known as Kramer from the Seinfeld show, recently went off on a racial tirade to an African-American person sitting in the front row of a recent stand-up show. Apparently the guy was heckling him a bit.

The remarks he made we’re so bad, we’re not even going to reproduce them here. You can go on over to TMZ to read about and see video of the act if you’d like.

In response, Richards last night appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman via satellite link as Jerry Seinfeld was on promoting the latest season of the Seinfeld DVD set.

Here’s TMZ:

As Richards began explaining the “nasty things” said about “Afro-Americans,” the audience couldn’t help but chuckle. Seinfeld, immediately scolded the crowd, saying “stop laughing, it ain’t funny.” But the crowd couldn’t help themselves.

The confused fans continued to chuckle, and Richards seemingly blamed Letterman for the awkwardness. “I’ve already heard you make some jokes about it and that’s OK, but I’m really busted up about it.”

Richards admitted that he may have acted without thinking. “I’m hearing your audience laugh … and I’m not even sure that this is where I should be addressing the situation.”

You can watch the video clip here.

Celebrities, CEOs, politicians, and other prominent figures often turn to highly watched TV shows as a medium unto which they can “set the record straight” or attempt to redeem themselves. Sometimes, it just doesn’t go right.

As PR pros, deciding about whether or not to advise a client to do such a thing is a challenging exercise. There are often many competing reasons for participating. To make things more stressful, the pressure to appear on Letterman – potentially a show you’ve been trying to get on forever – may be coming from the show’s producer and not from the internal side.

In the end, it comes down to your best judgment about what to recommend based on your experience with the spokesperson and thorough knowledge about the show’s format and interviewer’s style. You can even try to get a written agreement in place to frame the situation even further, but most news-only outlets aren’t going to let that fly.

For Richards, things like the audience’s reaction were out of his control and potentially destroyed his ability to regain any sort of confidence whatsoever. Instead, he might have better off showing how bad his remarks were through actual response versus simply getting on air and apologizing to an often vilified public.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Media, PR, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.