Michael Richards put a lot of effort into crafting Kramer for the immensely popular sitcom Seinfeld.
“I combed every second-hand shop here in Southern California looking for a particular clothing out of the 60s,” Richards told ABC News.
“And it was quite a quest.
“I’d built up a wardrobe. I probably had over 60 shirts and jackets and pants, but only two pairs of shoes. They were the shoes, down to the laces, that I felt comfortable in.”
Richards explains what went into becoming Kramer in his new memoir Entrances and Exits, which gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the show.
Richards couldn’t have anticipated the enormous success of Seinfeld, describing it as “mind-boggling”.
“None of us saw that coming,” he says.
“You do good work. And you see it’s catching on, but not to that level. That was just extraordinary.”
Even the American network that screened it, NBC, didn’t seem to have that much faith in the show initially, only commissioning it for four episodes.
The show ran from 1989 to 1998 and went out on a high, with the final episode attracting one of the largest audiences ever for a season finale.
Kramer was a crowd favourite and Richards won three Emmys for the role.
If you go back and watch the series, however, you’ll realise he has a different name in episode one, and his first name — Cosmo — wasn’t assigned to him till season 6. Richards put his stamp on what could have been a disposable character and made him an integral part of the show.
But Richards was so modest about his impact, that he was shocked into silence during an acceptance speech for an Emmy he didn’t expect to win.
“I was speechless,” Richards says.
“I would get on stage to receive I think the second Emmy and I couldn’t speak.
“I just stood there looking around. And the audience that night started to laugh. They thought it was funny … I said, ‘I really don’t know what to say.’
“And I stood there for 30 seconds, not saying anything.”
Richards says people were patting him on the back backstage telling him how hilarious he was, but he was mortified that he hadn’t thanked anyone. It wasn’t an act like people had thought.
“I was simply at a loss for words,” he said.
The curse of playing Kramer so well is that Richards struggled to land another substantial role when Seinfeld wrapped up, saying he was typecast.
The character is all casting agents could see when they saw his name pop up.
Richards says he was just doing his job on Seinfeld and had no idea how far it would go.
“I had a background in doing comedy, certainly in the area of eccentricity.
“Yes, I could be highly weird, and they wanted a highly weird next-door neighbour. So, I just worked each week to get the laughs.
“The material they gave me, I’d look it over and figure out how to get it to giddy up, just to get the laugh. Striving for the laugh.”
Raising a budding comedian
Richards isn’t the only person in his family “striving for the laugh”.
Always too critical of his own performances, Richards hadn’t really sat down to watch Seinfeld until he was writing his memoir, taking in all nine seasons.
When asked what he learnt from his son’s reactions to Kramer, after sitting down to watch the show with him, Richards says he learnt “that Kramer had indeed arrived”.
“I mean, here’s a generation … so many years have gone by and my son’s laughing and getting into the show. Oh my. There are no words for it,” he says.
“It’s just a feeling of, I could say, great contentment to be there with my son enjoying the show like this.
“I think it’s inspired him. He’s got the fool. He’s got the spark, so we’ll see where that goes.
“But he’s very inspired by comedy. He watches a lot of comedy.”
Richards says he would never push a career in comedy onto his son, but is happy to encourage an already active mind in that area.
“He already puts together little sketches and videos and he shows them to his class, and that’s certainly a start.
“I mean, as a sixth grader, he’s only 12, putting together these kinds of things is a big start.
“I didn’t get into comedy until I was really 14, 15 years old, although I made my friends laugh years earlier, but so has he, so we’ll see.”
Life after Seinfeld
The foreword to Entrances and Exits is written by comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who plays a fictional version of himself in the show that bears his name.
He’s currently performing stand-up around Australia, with a second Sydney performance interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters this week.
Richards knows what it’s like to be interrupted on stage.
In 2006, when a noisy group arrived during his stand-up comedy routine at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles, Richards acknowledged them in a way that prompted one to call out “You’re not funny”.
Richards’s infamous reaction to those three little words was caught on tape and went viral before things really went viral. This resulted in him “cancelling himself,” before people were really getting cancelled.
“It went deep,” he says of his self-imposed exile and period of reflection.
“Years and years of just being outside of show business.”
Richards dedicates a chapter to this incident in Entrances and Exits, the memoir that has prompted him to re-emerge publicly 18 years later.
He’s linked the rage he felt in that moment to a powerful slow reveal in his memoir, which ABC News has chosen not to publish so that fans can experience it for themselves the way it was intended.
Richards, who reads widely, put a lot into telling his story.
“I spent close to four years … finding the words for a memoir,” he says.
Entrances and Exits by Michael Richards is available in paperback and as an ebook and audiobook read by the author, with a foreword by Jerry Seinfeld.