If only Fatty were alive today

This past Sunday, Michael Richards and Larry David illustrated just how far the world of modern celebrity is from the one the rest of us are living in. On the latest episode of David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Richards, playing himself, is about to use the n-word in public when he realizes he’s surrounded by onlookers with video phones. This is, of course, a reference to Richards’ much-YouTubed 2006 on-stage rant that led to the total collapse of the previously beloved cultural icon.

Now, if you or I had done what Richards did, our only hope for expiation would have been something along the lines of a 12-step racism-expungement program — which, for the record, Richards did have to go through (let’s not forget Letterman, and those three years spent wondering in the outer darkness of industry indifference), but that’s where the similarities end. Richards also has the option to go on HBO, turn his sins into a performance piece, and move on, burden removed. Which is to say that the rise of self-referential comedies combined with the continued (and ever-deepening) obsession with celebrity gossip now allows for this kind of paid, (sort of) scripted absolution. After all, why apologize on Letterman when you can go on Extras or SNL and get yourself some laughs for playing the guy you should be apologizing for being in the first place?

This kind of ironic performative mea-culpa is both new (Fatty Arbuckle never made any one-reelers about sodomizing women to death) and available only to celebrities (if you get caught cheating on your wife, you don’t have the luxury of being able to extricate yourself from the situation by performing a one-act about a guy who cheats on his wife), and it raises an interesting issue: Are there still crimes so heinous that not even this approach will make up for them? Or, to put it into more self-reflective terms: Are we willing to let a celebrity off the hook for anything, provided he or she is clever enough to make us laugh about it?

What, for example, would Chris Brown have to do on camera to get us to forgive him for abusing Rihanna? Would it be enough for him to go on Saturday Night Live and play a kooky R&B singer who beats up any woman who makes him angry — a back-up dancer who misses a step, a back-up singer who misses a note, a waitress who brings him his eggs scrambled rather than fried, Sonia Santomayor, Hilary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Mother Earth, his mother, your mother, and so on and so on, ad infinitum, SNL-style,  until the stage is covered in female cast members? Would we forgive him then?

Or how ’bout Michael Vick? What if he went on Conan and electrocuted Triumph the Insult Comic Dog until the puppet was ready to take a chunk out of Andy Richter? Might that be enough to get the former star quarterback a fresh multimillion dollar contact? And could Roman Polanski find redemption for both himself and Woody Allen by playing a lecherous old film director in Allen’s latest, most personal, film? If Allen could make Polanski funny, in other words, would it be enough to wipe away his sins?

Sure, art needs to imitate life — otherwise David, Richards, and everyone else connected with Seinfeld would still be working the stand-up circuit — but when art is employed as a purgative for egregious personal missteps, it forces the offendees (namely, society as a whole) into the role of unwilling, if amused, accomplices. And who needs that from television?