The heckler was Black. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Am I the only one siding with Kramer on this?

I know that hecklers are a fact of life for performers. I've always been worried about being in an audience that has one.

I saw the video. I saw the apology. More importantly, I heard some of the comments made by the rude asshole who initiated it. Have you ever known anyone personally who would yell out something inappropriate to a comedian in front of an entire audience? His parents must be very proud.

Performing is not as easy as it looks. Just ask my friend Jon, who does it almost every night. Richards was provoked and annoyed repeatedly by people who should have been asked to leave. And in defending himself, he kinda lost it. It doesn't make him a racist. For the record, I hear Black people – including a lot of people in my company – call each other "Nigger" all day long. They seem surprisingly okay with it, too.

Besides, where was the security? If I was a bouncer at the Laugh Factory, I'd start dusting off my resume right about now.

Then of course, the whole thing spiraled downward, until there were no more people in the audience. Make no mistake; folks in a crowd will do what everyone else in the crowd is doing. The collective intelligence of a large group is always dumber than the individuals. So as a few people left, the ones who remained felt dumb, and they got up and left too. No one wants to feel dumb. Believe me, most people weren't leaving because they were offended.

Some comedians take it well. I've seen Dane Cook rebound fabulously from a heckler. And of course, Jerry Seinfeld's famous response to a heckler was, "This is my office. Would you like it if I came to your office and heckled you?" Crowd goes crazy. Heckler is embarrassed. Show moves on. Mr. Richards wasn't so lucky. He made a bad choice, but it was a result of someone else's bad choice.

In fact, there are some theatres in my neighborhood I can't even go to anymore to because of all the... let's call them minorities, and I don't mean Jews. For some reason, certain cultures love to talk back to the screen. Not to mention bringing their crying 3-year old children to the movies, even if they're not appropriate for children. I don't care how upstanding and politically correct you are, you know exactly what I mean. And you know how fucking annoying and unfair it is to everyone else. Does that make me a racist?

Michael Richards didn't attack anyone. He defended himself poorly from someone else's attack on him. Why are we demonizing the "hecklee", simply because his response to an ongoing provocation wasn't nice? You won't see any White people up in arms over the "Cracker" comment. But then, I've never been a big proponent of a proportional response.

You still love Michael Richards, and you know it. He deserved a little bit of quiet during his performance, he was totally broken up over how he reacted, and I do believe he deserves a statement of apology from the guys in the audience who started this whole thing.