There was an article in The Toronto Star on Friday that brought up an interesting take on the recent Michael Richards meltdown on stage at the Laugh Factory in L.A. According to Peter Howell (and apparently a few others), Richards’ outburst was not born out of racism, hatred, stress, or an inability to deal with hecklers. No, rather it was born out of envy for Sacha Baron Cohen and the success of Borat! Strangely, Howell believes that Borat is “a movie that makes it okay to laugh at sexism, anti-Semitism, pedophilia, bestiality, racism, incest, rape and any number of other social ills”, and that Richards was merely trying to “raise the bar” by imitating Cohen on stage.

Well I know we all have tendencies to make connections among cultural happenings (I’m just as much to blame as anyone else), but this is one parallel that I refuse to buy into. To start with, shock comedy is nothing new. In his editorial, Howell references There’s Something About Mary as launching a fad in gross out humour, for example. I fail to see any similarity between what Richards did on stage, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s satire, whether unconscious or otherwise. Yes Michael Richards wanted to shock his audience… of course he did! But I think he just launched into his attack without thinking and once he found himself in the middle of it, he hoped that by going completely overboard, it would become funny again. (Obviously it didn’t work.)

As a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen I just find it annoying that so many people are slinging mud at him right now, when in fact he has created one of the funniest movies to come out in a long, long time. Check out the article below and see if you agree with Howell’s argument. On a side note, it seems not everyone is blaming Cohen for all the hate in the world… a Kazakh writer has nominated him for an arts award for raising awareness of Kazakhstan!