Michael Richards

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.6 • 908 Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2024

⏱️ 98 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Richards is a multiple Emmy and SAG Award-winning actor best known for playing the iconic character Cosmo Kramer on the classic sitcom Seinfeld. After cutting his teeth on the Los Angeles comedy circuit alongside legends like Robin Williams, Sam Kinison, and Andy Kaufman, Richards landed minor film and TV roles throughout the 1980s, including the cultish late-night sketch comedy show Fridays and Weird Al Yankovic’s oddball comedy UHF, before exploding into pop cultural consciousness as Seinfeld’s Kramer. Richards’ latest project, his newly published book Entrances and Exits, provides an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at the highs and lows of his career, from his unconventional upbringing by his schizophrenic grandmother and single mother to his training as a theater actor and honing comedic instincts on stage, his time in the army during Vietnam, and his big break. With candor and humor, Richards chronicles how his private life and curiosity shaped his comedic talents, culminating in his Kramer fame before a health scare intensified a spiritual quest informing and inspiring his insightful memoir. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------ Lucy https://lucy.co/tetra ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra

Transcript

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0:00.0	Tetragrammaton
0:02.0	Tetragrammaton
0:03.0	My Grandmother My grandmother took care of me, but she was touched by schizophrenia.
0:28.6	So I was in the midst of that.
0:30.6	Wow.
0:31.6	The voices, you know, she was into voices.
0:34.6	And she was from Italy. She spoke to those voices in Italian.
0:41.3	So I was not versed in the language,
0:45.3	but I could feel her emotion.
0:48.3	And they were deep conversations, and sometimes she'd get into arguments.
0:53.3	You know, I don't know what the fight was
0:55.5	about but her heart was always there with me I was held all the time fed and cloth
1:02.7	taken care of my mother worked full time that's about it my father wasn't around my grandfather was there for a little while, but when I was three, he was hit by stroke, and that took him away.
1:17.8	Eventually, my grandmother wandered away, started wandering out of the house.
1:22.3	I would follow her when I'm four, four and a half five.
1:25.3	But I always knew I could make my way back home, you see, she couldn't.
1:29.4	So you would guide her back? No, I would call to her, but she would keep going. She would tell me to
1:34.3	go home, but protecting me in a sense. But where was she going? Wow. My mother would have to call the
1:41.9	police and then they'd put out search, they find her, bring her home.
1:45.0	It was over and over again like this.
1:47.0	But you didn't have any experience of anything different, so that was normal.
1:52.0	Quite normal. Yeah. Yeah. And her heart was there, so, you know, I looked back on it, I wasn't so abused or so neglected.
	...

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