Michael Richards What Do You Want from Jesse and Al? A Cookie?

Calling up Jesse and Al as if they were the co-Popes of black folks is almost as dumb as your lame, racist onstage repartee. There is nothing you can do to win back black fans. That ship has sailed.
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Look, I hate gotcha politics and everyone's tongue slips now and again. When Jessie said Hymietown in what he though was an off-the-record session with a reporter he also had clocked over two decades of working closely with Jewish leaders to advance the rights of all. It would be asinine to summarize anyone's career to one or two ill-chosen quips spat out in a drunken furor.

But calling up Jesse and Al as if they were the co-Popes of black folks is almost as dumb as your lame, racist onstage repartee.

There is nothing you can do to win back black fans. That ship has sailed. The best you can do is lay low until the next celeb gets drunk and puts his foot in his mouth. I got it. Why don't you get Jason Alexander plastered, and then pay a Chinese-American driver to cut him off on Santa Monica boulevard? Or ply Julie Louis-Dreyfus with Kahlua and get one of her Salvadoran maids to scorch her favorite blouse? Then, my friend, just sit back with your videocamera and cross your fingers.

Until then, don't hire damage control specialists and take Jesse and Al out for steaks.

If you had just said the n word you might have one day been forgiven but you went for a lynch joke. Yes, a lynch joke. Is that being cheeky and irreverent? Is that like that wigger shit Tarentino tries to pull, crowbarring the n word into every script because he thinks he's that bad of a white boy?

I don't think so.

Suggesting that your obnoxious hecklers should be lynched for disrupting your set is about as funny as having suggested, had they been Jews, that for their rudeness they be gassed.

I'm all for funny and if it's funny enough I don't care how offensive it is. Jackass, Borat, Kinison, Rickles. Great comedians push our buttons when our buttons are our hypocrisies and hang-ups. Lazy, lame comedians go for the cheap shot.

Stay off the stage till you get your act together.

--Trey Ellis

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