There are a few names in comedy that are utterly unique, with a truly one-of-a-kind comedic style—people like Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Sacha Baron Cohen, Charles Grodin, Steven Wright, Zach Galifianakis, Ricky Gervais, and Sarah Silverman. Michael Richards is among this elite group. There’s no one like him before or since.
Richards, now 76, is best known for the Cosmo Kramer character on Seinfeld from 1989 to 1998. He’s a three-time Primetime Emmy Award winner for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series (1993, 1994, and 1997). He’s also remembered for a troubling incident on Nov. 17, 2006, when he was appearing at West Hollywood’s the Laugh Factory, where he was heckled by a group of Black and Hispanic latecomers to the show. He launched into a racist tirade, a moment of anger he deeply regrets.
Hear about his journey
Character actor Michael Richards graces the Fremont Theater stage on Thursday, Sept. 25, in Entrances and Exits: An Evening of Conversations, Questions, and Answers (doors at 7 p.m.; event at 8; all ages; $39.11 to $75.68 at prekindle.com). He’ll talk about his life and career and field audience questions.
You can hear all about his life and career when he comes to the Fremont Theater on Thursday, Sept. 25.
“Well, it’s quite an arc because I’m going to start out with some of how I got to Seinfeld and what that did to me,” Richards explained during a recent phone call, “and then more about coming out from behind a character, coming more into myself and feeling comfortable being myself and not being a character, because I am a definitive character actor. And that’s what my whole career in show biz was all about for 29 years. Just playing characters. I was what I called an ‘eccentricity specialist.’
“They bring me in to develop some kind of interesting character for the show,” he continued. “So that’s what I did. I made characters. And so now at 76, it’s just been tuning into more of what I am as a human being. Apart from character-making and showbiz, the task has been more about being myself and how I’ve become rather natural in that I’ve discovered a place where I stand with nature more closely than ever. I see an interrelatedness between myself and this planet. Now, that’s heavy. I know that’s heavy. What I just said there. But it’s like the bringing together of body and soul or matter. And psyche or nature and man.”
These days Richards is very introspective and forthright, and why not? He already bared his soul to anyone interested in reading his 2024 New York Times bestselling autobiography Entrances and Exits, in which he talks about his upbringing, his highs, his lows. We learn, for instance, that what Richards was able to achieve as a character actor can’t be taught.
“It came from my blood, my bones,” he said. “It came very natural, easy in a sense. I mean, I had to work hard to keep up with what was coming through me, but as I mentioned in my book, I had a very powerful dream that I had to enter the comedy arts. It was so strong that I started working in the comedy clubs, and it came so easy for me. I wasn’t a stand-up comic. I was more of a what Paul Reubens would call a performing artist.”
Within a few months of playing comedy clubs, Richards was discovered and landed a spot on the sketch comedy TV show Fridays (1980 to 1982), appearing in 59 episodes. He also had some early movie roles and TV show guest roles until landing the role of Kramer.
“That’s how fast it came, how easy it came for me,” he said, “but there were years and years of doing theater. I was a student at California Academy of Studio Arts, you know, doing all that. And I think I was close to the eccentric because I was raised by a paranoid schizophrenic grandmother. My mother worked full time, and she took care of me, this grandmother, but she was all heart, even though she heard voices and whatnot. God knows what kind of characters were spinning around in her head, you know? So there you have it—touched by the eccentric.”
Early in his career, Richards and Andy Kaufman worked together, and a lot of how Richards developed his bits came from improv.
“That’s pretty much the way I worked,” he explained. “I had some material, but I improvised, I moved around the material. It was very, very loose onstage. Very, very loose. Andy and I were friends at the time. You know, we’d come up with that routine of him breaking out of the sketch on Fridays.”
The famous scene in question was about two couples out for dinner where Kaufman seemingly forgets his lines so Richards storms off stage, grabs the cue cards, and dumps them in Kaufman’s lap. Kaufman dumps his water glass on Richards’ head, and then scene devolves into a physical altercation. The live audience and TV viewers thought it was real, but it was all an act.
“I loved his fearlessness,” Richards said of Kaufman. “His fearlessness and just doing all kinds of weird things. I remember one time he just had a washer and dryer hooked up onstage. At 12 o’clock at night, he just did his laundry and sat in a chair looking at a magazine. That was his act. He cleared the room. After a while, people just kind of got bored, you know, and they left. But that’s Andy’s act—a kind of performance, a kind of happening.”
Richards’ career stalled after Seinfeld. The Michael Richards Show taped nine episodes in 2000 but was canceled. He did voice work in Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie in 2007. He played himself on three episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2009.
Many were shocked when Seinfeld ended its run at the top of its game, the No. 1 show on TV.
“I was OK with it,” Richards said. “When Jerry shifted and wanted to put an end to the show, I shifted with him. We were very interconnected, all of us, as an ensemble. If one of us wasn’t in on it, it affected the other three. We’d been doing this for nine years, and really working hard at it, and we were getting very, very good throughout the years, as in ensemble. We worked very well together.”
Richards has certainly had an amazing life, being drafted into the Army in 1970 at the height of the Vietnam War, discovering his father didn’t die in a car accident when he was 2 but instead learning he was the product of rape, being twice married with two children—an adult daughter with two kids of her own from his first marriage and a 14-year-old son from his current marriage—surviving prostate cancer, doing what he labeled “self-canceling” after he stepped out of the spotlight following his racist rant.
But Michael Richards is a survivor.
“I still carry it, and I don’t expect other people to forgive me all the way through. It was pretty horrible, the things I said. I’m not looking for people to love me or accept me, so I’m OK,” he said. “Other people just have to work it out in their own way. I did the personal work. I know where I stand in the midst of saying that sort of thing to another human being, you know? Everybody takes their fall, right? Everybody’s got their shit that they have to attend to, you know?
“So how do you forgive yourself? You find the understanding in it. That’s what real forgiveness is. Don’t be too hard on others. Take a look at your own googah.” ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Sept 18-28, 2025.