A few blocks away from my house in LA is a comedy club called The Laugh Factory. I’ve never much liked the place. There’s a long wait at the door, the stage isn’t intimate and the club was involved in introducing a terminally ill young boy to Michael Jackson.

I imagine that Michael Richards, aka Kramer from Seinfeld, also now has a bit of thing about The Laugh Factory. It was there, last week, that he reacted to a group of black hecklers by telling them that 50 years ago he would have impaled them upside down on pitchforks. Richards then pointed at one of the men and repeatedly shouted: “He’s a nigger!” Mobile phone footage of the tirade was broadcast online. Soon after, Richards’s career was declared dead.

It’s easy to conclude that Richards’s mistake was being racist. But that’s not entirely true. Richards’s biggest mistake was being unfunny. American pop-culture is getting less politically correct by the day, and racial insults are more acceptable than you might think — in the right context. Just look at Borat, which has taken $110 million at the US box office, partly thanks to jokes about persecuting Jews.

Admittedly, Sacha Baron Cohen has the ultimate get-of-jail card of actually being Jewish. But it’s hard to deny the growing popularity in the US of gratuitously personal barbs, racial or otherwise. The best can be found at the annual “roasts” of New York Friar’s Club — where a celebrity is put on stage and given a kind of a reverse toast. In 1993 Whoopi Goldberg was roasted with a poor-taste racial skit from Ted Danson, of Cheers fame. The routine included Danson blacking up his face and repeatedly using the N-word. “Why anyone would take offence to Ted roasting me in the tradition of the Club is beyond me,” Goldberg later insisted.

Black culture itself has a tradition of insult-based humour, whether it’s focused on white people, or the one-upmanship of “playing the dozens” — in which two people try to outdo each other with barbs about the other’s mother (“the dozens” is a reference to the gallows humour of slaves who were so old or infirm they were traded by the dozen). This inspired the new MTV reality show, Yo Momma. However, academics have traced the first Yo Momma joke back to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, in which Apemantus is called a dog. He replies: “Thy mother’s of my generation. What’s she, if I be a dog?”

Clearly, Richards didn’t have the talent for any of this. And perhaps, given recent history, there’s nothing a white man can say about the N-word that’s funny. But instead of asking for cash, as Richards’s hecklers are now doing, I wish they could have served their revenge the old-fashioned way.

I’m reminded of that infamous exchange in cricket, when the Australian bowler Glenn McGrath tried to break the concentration of the Zimbabwean Eddo Brandes by asking why he was so fat. Brandes replied: “Because every time I f*** your wife, she gives me a biscuit.”

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