but it’s not like Seinfeld was ever supposed to be racial in any way, positive or negative.

I think perhaps you should look at it from another side. The face of television in mainstream America is generally white. You have to have the kind of enculturation in order to relate to it in the first place.

“Black people talk at the movies” is to the history of audience participation in Afro-American culture what “Jews are good with money” is to the history of Middle Eastern traders and European Anti-Semitism. Read the comments at Anil Dash’s page. Watch Danny Hoch rip Seinfeld a new one: no one’s responded to that.
Dash’s BS is not dealing with the issue, it avoids dealing with the issue. He asks complex questions to avoid asking hard ones, overintellectualizing to avoid serious thought. I find that pretension given the context, even more annoying than usual.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBMQn5t3lRk

is probably the best commentary on the incident I’ve seen.

The problem is that in the situation of a comedy club the heckler is a force that can interrupt the actual event. A movie keeps playing, no matter what, but an unruly drunk and disrespectful heckler can bring a comic’s performance to a halt. Thus, it is usually the case that comics learn to deal with hecklers by including them in the performance and playing off of them to keep the show going (since that is basically the heckler’s goal anyway, to usurp the throne, so to speak).

I still havn’t made up my mind whether Richards was actually acting with racist intent, or if he just knew that these words would trigger a response in the hecklers, as the hecklers also traded racial insults (understandably so). It’s inexcusable in any case. But imagine if Carlos Mencia were the one saying those things. That guy seems to be able to get away with perpetuating every racist steretype in the book (and not in an ironic way) and no one bats an eye. Replace Richards with Mencia and I bet everyone would have been howling with laughter.

I take this shit personally. But I think I’ve mde my point.

We could look at AAVE – there are some regional features in common with Southern English, but there are strong affinities across urban areas even on opposite coasts, and there are many features which are not reducible to region. I don\’t know if that is the case here, but I would not be surprised.

Obviously class is important, but it would be hard to say how it is important. There is obviously strong pressure to conform as one moves up the socio-economic ladder. But there is also a fair amount of code-switching that goes on. One would have to see if the same behavior was exhibited in different neighborhoods.

From personal experience in NY it is very much about neighborhood. Before Times Square was turned into Disney World I used to watch movies there with a predominantly black audience. It was a very different experience than watching movies in other neighborhoods. In Robo Cop 2, when they were standing around in a circle shooting him, everyone was screaming \”Oh shit!\” and the like. When his body stopped twitching the theater fell silent, until one person said \”Is he dead?\” Everyone laughed, and then one women yelled \”Yeah, they killed the mutherfucker!!!\”

Now, most theaters in mid-town wouldn\’t allow this kind of behavior now, but in Queens it is a different matter. There it is still uncertain what standards prevail, and I\’ve been in movies where a couple of people are engaging in this kind of back-and-forth with the movie while other people find it inappropriate.

If Richards had any guts he’d find a black comic to work with and push it.