One more Richards rant

One "comedian" I seldom thought worthy of the name was Sam Kinison. Of course, I never found Rosanne Barr or Andrew Dice Clay funny either but I suppose there is a market for that sort of thing. Still, go here and read the blurb in the second paragraph.
If you really enjoy good writing, you probably caught his call-back when the woman suggested his heckler cracks for her time with Murphy. Either way...note a few things.
"He began calling the guy names and like a really demented high school kid...
On and on he went, making up deviant sex fantasies about the heckler's mother, each lewder than the one before.
You instantly realized that Kinison had decided he was not going to be satisfied to merely get the heckler to shut up.
Sam was on a wireless mike so we were sitting there in the Comedy Store, listening to him out on Sunset Boulevard yelling at his victim for about three minutes, apparently as the guy got into his car and drove off."
Did not exactly kill his career. Probably should have...
My point, however, is simply this...and yes, I guess in a way I am defending Richards even though he is all but indefensible...he was not exactly going out on a limb. He did nothing that is not done every day by comedians responding to hecklers. And he was not doing anything that is not socially acceptable...he just got the "bad break" of being an idiot using the wrong words at the wrong time. If he were intelligent he would have prepared a better response to potential hecklers that did not involve racial slurs. He should have prepared a light hearted, mature response instead of a childish, hateful, deliberately hurtful (per his own admission) response.
I do not defend what he said, I just sort of "get" why he might have thought, in the moment, it was acceptable. Hopefully he gets his head screwed on straight, eliminates those words from his vocabulary...and from his belief system...meanwhile, I do put part of the blame on society for making it seem that comics can get away with stuff like that by making them believe we will find it funny. It is still his fault for being dumb enough to do it...and although it looks like I am defending him I really do not have that intention. I am trying to point out the flaw in US that makes people like HIM think they can get away with this garbage.
After all, people like Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay and Richard Pryor already set the bar....and they set it pretty low. Richards is a piker in the offensiveness charts, he just got pegged because he got taped.