By the fall of 2006, Michael Richards should have been coasting on nostalgia. Best remembered as the manic, rubber-limbed neighbor Kramer on Seinfeld, Richards had spent years basking in the glow of what many critics still hail as the most influential sitcom of its generation. But in November of that year, inside the Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard, Richards’ career—and his public image—took a dramatic, near-fatal turn.
The incident is now burned into Hollywood lore. Confronted by hecklers during his stand-up set, Richards erupted in a racially charged tirade, unleashing the N-word and other incendiary remarks. Camera phones captured it all, and within hours the clip spread across national news and the then-young YouTube, a wildfire scandal in the making. The shock was doubled by the source: a sitcom star whose popularity had come from embodying eccentric charm rather than controversy.
Richards’ subsequent apology on David Letterman’s Late Show was itself a surreal spectacle. With Seinfeld sitting uncomfortably beside him, Richards appeared via satellite, visibly shaken, contrite but meandering. “I’m not a racist,” he insisted, yet the apology, more confessional than controlled, underscored the depth of the implosion. “It was painful to watch,” one late-night booker remembers. “You could see a man realizing his entire career had just ended.”
For the better part of a decade, it had. While Seinfeld’s other alumni thrived—Julia Louis-Dreyfus reinventing herself as television royalty, Jason Alexander in steady character work, Jerry Seinfeld himself curating a second act in stand-up and Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee—Richards was conspicuously absent. In an industry that thrives on reinvention, he became Hollywood’s exile.
And yet, quietly, he began the long work of reputation repair. In 2009, Richards re-emerged, not through a comeback tour or splashy interview, but through Larry David. The Curb Your Enthusiasm season that staged a fictional “Seinfeld reunion” slyly wove in Richards’ scandal, allowing him to parody his disgrace. The episode was a masterstroke of Hollywood rehabilitation—self-awareness as penance. “It was Larry’s idea to lean into it,” recalls a Curb producer. “Michael agreed, and to his credit, he played it with humility.”
Away from the spotlight, Richards made quieter moves. Those close to him say he spent years confronting his anger, seeking counsel, and extending private apologies. Unlike others who have weaponized scandal into reinvention, Richards receded. “There was no playbook, no PR machine spinning him back,” says one longtime comedy agent. “He just…disappeared.”
His 2020 memoir, Entrances and Exits, offered the most unfiltered glimpse into his psyche. Stripped of publicists and studio gloss, the book chronicled not just the highs of Seinfeld, but the emptiness that followed—and the unraveling that climaxed that November night. Critics noted its candor: “It reads like a confession, not a career move,” wrote one reviewer.
People Magazine: Seinfeld’s Michael Richards Says Racist Laugh Factory Rant Made Him Face His Insecurities: ‘The Damage Was Inside of Me’
The actor, who played Cosmo Kramer on ‘Seinfeld,’ disappeared after a wild rant towards hecklers upended his career. Now, 17 years later, he’s opening up about facing his demons in a new memoir.
On April 30, 2024, Seinfeld fans were surprised to see Michael Richards, the actor who played Cosmo Kramer on the sitcom between 1989-1998, at the premiere of Jerry Seinfeld’s new movie, Unfrosted.
Because for the past 18 years, Richards has largely stayed out of the public eye — ever since he was caught on camera in 2006 hurling racial insults, including the N-word to a group of hecklers during a stand-up set.
Now he’s making a tentative return to the public eye with the release of his memoir Entrances and Exits (out June 4 from Permuted Press), in which he writes about his childhood, his rise to fame on Seinfeld, and yes, that night at the Laugh Factory that upended his career.
Seinfeld’s Michael Richards to Release New Memoir in 2024 (Exclusive)
“I was immediately sorry the moment I said it onstage,” Richards, 74, tells PEOPLE. But he knows he doesn’t expect the world to forgive and forget. “I’m not looking for a comeback.”“My anger was all over the place and it came through hard and fast,” he continues. “Anger is quite a force. But it happened. Rather than run from it, I dove into the deep end and tried to learn from it. It hasn’t been easy.” He adds, “Crisis managers wanted me to do damage control. But as far as I was concerned, the damage was inside of me.”
Of the night in 2006 when he fought with a group of hecklers, he has no valid excuse. “I’m not racist,” he says of the hurtful words he used that night. “I have nothing against Black people. The man who told me I wasn’t funny had just said what I’d been saying to myself for a while. I felt put down. I wanted to put him down.”
However, Richards’ memoir isn’t only about that night his career ended; it’s also about his unconventional upbringing by a single mom, the trauma over learning the truth about his father, his time in the Army, his rise to fame after becoming Cosmo Kramer and his difficulty with being a celebrity. It’s also about the interpersonal work he’s done and his life over the past 17 years, mostly spent reading and studying religion and philosophy.
“[I’m] learning and healing. Healing and learning,” he says of his life now, as husband to actress Beth Skipp and dad to their son Antonio. “But life is always an up and a down. I continue to work through the day and the night, the light and the dark that I am.”
Today, Michael Richards’ name no longer sparks scandal headlines, though neither does it inspire the unalloyed affection once reserved for Kramer. Instead, he stands as one of Hollywood’s more complicated figures: a cautionary tale, yes, but also a case study in contrition without spectacle. “He didn’t chase the redemption arc,” says an executive at a major studio. “That might be why people are slowly willing to let him back in.”
In award-season parlance, Richards is unlikely to headline a comeback vehicle or take a victory lap on the Oscar circuit. But in an era where celebrity implosions are often followed by shameless reinventions, his retreat—and the hesitant, halting re-emergence—has given his story a different texture. One not of triumph, but of survival.
“Michael’s legacy will always be two-sided,” a fellow comic says. “On one hand, he gave us one of the greatest sitcom characters of all time. On the other, he gave us one of the ugliest moments in comedy history. The truth of who he is now lies somewhere in between.”
And perhaps that, more than any staged redemption, is the real afterlife of Michael Richards’ career: not a clean narrative, but a complicated one—Hollywood’s most enduring commodity.