Michael Richards’ Redemption Tour Comes to Screeching Halt With Fox News Appearance

Michael Richards is currently making the media rounds to promote his new memoir, which has led to a lot of discussion of his notorious 2006 racist outburst. Hardly any interviewers have asked about UHF, or his work on Fridays.

While appearing on The View earlier this week, Richards explained that the “horrific” Laugh Factory meltdown was due to the fact that he’s “not a normal man.” He also stated, “I went into character. And I work in a comedy club environment where the N-word is used a lot, and I decided I would let it loose.” 

After Joy Behar took issue with that particular claim, Richards went on to lay part of the blame on his Italian heritage? As some have noted, it didn’t exactly seem like a “sincere apology.”

Still, Richards’ attempt at a redemption tour is clearly winning back some fans. After all, he has been largely out of the public spotlight for the past 16 years, but is now being warmly welcomed onto talk shows to hype his book. And some fans have even come around to the concept of forgiving Richards — that is, until his latest promotional stop: Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime. 

While appearing on the show, Richards had some truly bizarre exchanges with Tucker Carlson’s replacement. After Richards confessed that he never actually watched all of Seinfeld until recently with his son, Watters mused, “I don’t watch myself either afterwards. I’m too critical; I’m too much of a craftsman. Maybe one day when my career’s over, I’ll watch every single Jesse Watters Primetime episode with my son and just be inspired by the brilliance like you were.”

Instead of throwing up in his mouth a little bit, which would have been the appropriate response, Richards replied, “Yeah, Jesse. You will be. I’m sure you will be.”

Going on Fox News to publicly compliment Watters arguably shows that Richards hasn’t really evolved in the way that he wants us to think he has, considering that the network has a long history of peddling racist propaganda. I mean, this is the channel that gleefully aired a hate crime on live TV just a few months ago.

Richards is supposedly trying to make amends for an incident in which he repeatedly screamed racial epithets at Black people by cozying up to a guy with a long history of racist statements? Remember when Watters suggested that “absent fathers” and “education issues” were a bigger threat to Black Americans than white supremacy? Or how about his wildly offensive 2016 Chinatown segment for The O’Reilly Factor? Watters later expressed “regret” over the piece, but not enough to ask Fox News take it off of YouTube, I guess.

And that’s just the tip of an iceberg made of Rockstar Energy cans and soiled copies of Maxim. Whether it’s attacking trans children or raging against migrants, Watters has made bigotry his brand. By appearing on his show, Richards has just invalidated all of his previous apologies confusing pseudo-apologies. 

Man, this press tour is even worse than the one for Kramer’s coffee-table book.

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