Entertainment
'Seinfeld' star Michael Richards is more than the worst thing that ever happened to them
Michael Richards, who shot to fame as Kramer on the hit sitcom “Seinfeld,” is releasing a memoir, “Entrances and Exits.”
(Marcus Ubungen / For The Times)
On the Shelf
Entrances and Exits
By Michael Richards
Permuted Press: 440 pages, $35
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Michael Richards entered the cultural consciousness, and the apartment next door, as a force of spontaneity named Cosmo Kramer. He was the rubber-limbed, unchained id of “Seinfeld,” the most popular sitcom of its era and a cultural phenomenon cultish in its fervor but too massive to really be considered a cult. Richards and Kramer worked without a net. The energy, the motion, the kavorka forever verged on chaos. But the chaos had a purpose, and it was tremendously popular. Richards won three Emmys for the role, and regularly earned the show’s biggest laughs.
Then, late one November night in 2006, the chaos tipped over into disaster. Performing a surprise set at the Laugh Factory, a venerable Los Angeles comedy club, Richards responded to some hecklers with a viciously ugly tirade. He hurled the N-word about, over and over, turning a night of uncomfortable comedy into the kind of incident that destroys careers. This was early in the era of ubiquitous cellphone cameras, when a horrible mistake could instantly be transmitted around the world. Richards quickly pivoted to damage control, making an appearance via satellite to apologize during his friend Jerry Seinfeld’s visit to “The Late Show With David Letterman.” But the damage was done. He was now widely labeled a racist, and worse.
Richards addresses his night of infamy in his new memoir, “Entrances and Exits,” and once again apologizes. The pop culture mulch machine will quickly reduce the book to soundbites: “Michael Richards says he’s not a racist!” But the Laugh Factory incident is but one tendril of Richards’ book, albeit an important one, tying into the dangerous high-wire act of performance in general and stand-up comedy in particular. It’s the story of a very lonely kid, raised by a working mother, a schizophrenic grandmother and the streets of Southern California; an army veteran who found his life’s purpose on the stage, poured everything into his craft, rose to the height of his profession, never learned to control his rage, flamed out in horrific fashion — and set about slowly rebuilding himself.
It’s also a reminder that everyone is more than the worst thing that ever happened to them — and that stability and comedy don’t always get along.
“It’s what I call the irrational,” Richards, 74, said in a telephone interview from his L.A. home. “We’re constantly being challenged … and anger’s in the midst of it. So it’s always an ongoing endeavor with me. We strive to be persistently rational, but there’s always the irrational, there’s always the mistake, there’s always the pratfall.”
“Public condemnation and humiliation are forms of justice,” Michael Richards writes in his memoir about the response to his racist Laugh Factory rant.
(Marcus Ubungen / For The Times)
Before Kramer, before public shame, there was a child wandering around Baldwin Hills, wondering who his father was and what might have happened to him. The kid soon discovered he liked to perform in drama class. It gave him a way to release the confusion and anxiety inside, and to make people laugh. But the kid still had a restless spirit. He studied acting at the California Institute of the Arts, created an absurdist, highly physical comedy act with his friend Ed Begley Jr. and was drafted into the army in 1970. Stationed in West Germany, he joined the V Corps Training Road Show; he took on the role of a colonel for that theater company. He stayed in character 24/7, even obtaining fake official military identification. It was the start of a lifelong obsession with creating and inhabiting a persona.
By 1989, when fellow former “Fridays” writer-cast member Larry David and Seinfeld had him audition for a new series then called “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” Richards was ready to launch. Much of his character, who was originally called Kessler, was on the page. But Richards built him into a rollicking, three-dimensional creation, right down to the clothes on his back.
“What Kramer wore was all hand-picked by me,” Richards said. “I gathered that wardrobe by combing every secondhand store in Southern California looking for shirt packs. All the clothing is out of the ’60s because my character is still pretty much wearing what he wore then. That’s why the pants are short and so forth, because he’s just a little taller. Everything about the character is justified.”
In “Entrances and Exits” Richards writes that he always considered himself more of a character actor or performance artist than a comedian, though he was also a creature of the comedy clubs on and off throughout his career. His act was never scripted and usually wild — falling on tables, walking onto the stage, futzing with the microphone stand and leaving. More than once in the book Richards uses the word “knockabout” to describe his school of comedy. But he also could be quite disciplined: Between seasons of “Seinfeld” he was often off studying acting in New York, trying to hone his craft.
Onstage, Richards generally went where the spirit moved him. And the spirit could get dark and unpredictable. He was friends with Sam Kinison, a comic whose entire act was based in rage, and there were times when Kinison alarmed Richards with the diamond-like purity of his anger. “He scares me,” Richards writes of his early impressions of Kinison. “I think he’s crazy and I’m heading in the same direction.”
By 2006 “Seinfeld” was in the rearview mirror. Richards’ follow-up series, “The Michael Richards Show,” had been swiftly canceled in 2000. He was a little adrift, and dipping his toe back into stand-up. On Nov. 17, 2006, he took the stage at the Laugh Factory later than usual. He was ill at ease, in angry-comedian mode, walking that razor’s edge between volatile performer and unhappy human. Then he heard the voice from the balcony: “We don’t think you’re very funny!”
“Of course, looking back at it, I wish I had just agreed with him,” Richards writes. “‘Okay, I’m not very funny tonight. Is there anything I can do? Wash your car, mow your lawn? I don’t want you leaving dissatisfied.’ Instead, I take his remark pretty hard. A solid punch below the belt.”
And he snapped — loudly, violently, using some of the ugliest language known to man.
Yes, he is sorry. And he accepts the descent into purgatory that followed. “Public condemnation and humiliation are forms of justice,” he writes. And nothing about his personal rehabilitation seems merely performative. Richards has spent his post-Laugh Factory years learning to live with himself away from the stage (although he still welcomes the occasional acting gig). He has studied the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta in Cambodia. He and his second wife, Beth, had a son, with whom he has finally brought himself to enjoy watching “Seinfeld” (for many years he was haunted by thoughts of how much better his performance could have been). He has fought, and, for the time being, defeated prostate cancer.
Michael Richards says these days, “I sit with the natural world, which seems to be behind most of everything we’re up to.” His memoir, “Entrances and Exits,” is out June 4.
(Marcus Ubungen / For The Times)
He is intent to continue doing what he calls “heart work,” figuring out who he really is and what animates the darkness within. Much like the kid who once roamed Baldwin Hills, he takes daily walks in the mountains of Southern California. “I want to get behind the behind, behind the words, the anger, the person, the cultural conditions and so forth,” he said. “So I sit with the natural world, which seems to be behind most of everything we’re up to.”
Pleas for forgiveness can get boring. “Entrances and Exits” is something else: an accounting of a life and the performances that go into it, for better and worse.
Movie Reviews
Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror
I am a sucker for all those straight-to-video slasher movies from the 90’s; there was just a certain point where you knew the acting was terrible, however, it made you fall in love. I can definitely remember scanning the video store sections for all the different horror movies I could. All those movies had laughable names and boom mics accidentally getting in the frame. Trucker seems like a child of all those old dreams, because it is.
Let’s get into the review.
Synopsis
When a group of reckless teens cause an accident swroe to never speak of it. The father is reescued by a strange man. from the wreckage and nursed back to health by a mysterious old man. When the group agrees to visit the accident scene, they meet their match from a strange masked trucker and all his toys with revenge on his mind.
Roll on 18 Wheleer
Trucker is what you would imagine: a movie about a psychotic trucker chasing you. We have seen it many, many times. What makes the film so different is its homage to bad movies but good ideas. I don’t mean in a negative way. When you think of a slasher movie, it’s not very complicated; as a matter of fact, it takes five minutes to piece the film together. This is so simple and childlike, and I absolutely love it. Trucker gave us something a little different, not too gory, bad CGI fire, I mean, this is all we old schlock horror fans want. Trucker is the type of film that you expect from a Tubi Original, on speed. However, I would take this over any Tubi Original.
I found some parts that were definitely a shout-out to the slasher humor from all those movies. Another good point that made the film shine was the sets. I guess what I can say is the film is everything Joy Ride should have been. While most modern slashers are trying to recreate the 1980s, the film stands out with its love for those unloved 1990’s horror films. While most see Joyride, you are extremely mistaken, my friend; you will enjoy this film much more.

In The End
In the end, I enjoyed the entire film. At first, I saw it listed as an action thriller; I was pleasantly surprised, and Trucker pulled at my heart strings, enveloping me in its comfort from a long-forgotten time in horror. It’s a nostalgic blast for me, thinking back to that time, my friends, my youth, and finding my new home. Horror fans are split down the middle: from serial-killer clowns (my side) to elevated horror, where an artist paints a forty-thousand-year-old demon that chases them around an upper-class studio apartment. I say that a lot, but it’s the best way to describe some things.
The entire movie had me cheering while all the people I hated suffered dire consequences for their actions. It’s the same old story done in a way that we rabid fans could drool over, and it worked. In all the bad in the world today, and my only hope for the future is the soon-to-end Terrifier franchise. However, the direction was a recipe to succeed with 40+ year old horror fans like me. I see the film as a hope for tomorrow, leading us into a new era.
Trucker is set to release on March 10th, 2026
Entertainment
Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater
The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.
Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.
Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.
Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.
The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”
As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)
As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.
Movie Reviews
‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel
It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.”
Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?
I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.
The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic.
FINAL STATEMENT
You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.
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