Wit & Attitude Quote by Michael Richards

A public unraveling, mid-apology, where the real drama is less about the slur than about the speaker's sudden collision with his own self-image. Michael Richards frames the moment as a kind of possession: "it comes through", "it fires out of me". That language is doing defensive work. It shifts agency away from a person making choices and toward an eruption, an involuntary discharge. The subtext is a plea: don't judge the whole of me by the worst thing I did when cornered.

The line also exposes how celebrity confession tries to metabolize shame. "I'm not a racist" is the incantation every disgraced public figure reaches for, because it aims at the distinction between identity and action: I did a racist thing, but I am not a racist person. Richards' phrasing makes that distinction wobble. He doesn't argue he was misunderstood; he admits the ugliness "comes through". The "and yet it's said" acknowledges what audiences already know from the tape: intent doesn't erase impact, and denial doesn't beat evidence.

Context matters: this was Richards responding after his 2006 Laugh Factory outburst, a moment when phone cameras and viral clips started turning backstage cruelty into public record. His comedy persona (Kramer as elastic, harmless chaos) collapses against a rawer American script: anger, humiliation, racial threat. "As I confront myself" tries to stage accountability as an inner reckoning, but it's also a performance of contrition meant to stabilize a career. The line works because you can hear both truths at once: genuine panic at what he revealed, and the strategic need to contain it.