In the history of comedy, I am literally a marginal figure: One of my jokes is contained in the margins of the 25th anniversary edition of The Big Book of Jewish Humor by William Novak and Moshe Waldoks.

The four-sentence joke is just about all that remains of my short-lived career as a stand-up comedian. I did well in a contest, performed at a few synagogues, and was the headliner at the Fifth Annual History of the Catskills Conference. The organizer of the conference described my act as “one part Woody Allen, one part Maimonides.” I would have preferred that he specify which parts but figured I could retire, having worked the Catskills.

All of which makes me, well, marginally more qualified than the average person to analyze the now infamous amateur video of actor Michael Richards’ racist rant at a Los Angeles comedy club. The video, in which Richards repeatedly uses the “N-word” and other choice epithets, caused a cultural tsunami. A stricken Richards, who played Kramer on Seinfeld, tried to salvage what remains of a struggling career by apologizing on David Letterman’s late-night show. Some civil rights activists have suggested a boycott of Seinfeld DVDs, and the minority press has been attaching huge significance to the incident, as if Richards represented something more than a frustrated actor who didn’t know the cameras were rolling.

I’ve watched the Richards clip over and over. I don’t see a bigot who, under pressure, allows his suppressed racism to rise to the surface and explode. I see an angry comedian trying to create a comic moment and failing, miserably.

You might ask what could possibly be “comic” about a racial slur, but I am willing to bet — up until last week, that is — that on any given night in comedy clubs across America, comedians are engaging in ethnic and racial banter across the color line. Most of this banter is fairly innocuous — a white comic asking why blacks talk back to movie screens, a black comic putting on a “white” voice to mock the hopelessly unhip. And sometimes it gets a little edgy, digging deeper into the kinds of things races think about each other but dare not say aloud.

Other comedians, like British comic Sacha Baron Cohen, mine the comic potential of bigotry by creating characters. Cohen’s “Borat” is a racist, anti-Semitic buffoon, but calling Cohen a bigot is like accusing Carroll O’Connor of racism because he played Archie Bunker. Let’s pretend for a moment that everyone gets the joke — that Borat and Archie are funny because they are so wrongheaded, and we the audience are so enlightened. Cohen gets away with Jew jokes and O’Connor with racial slurs because it’s the character talking, not the creator.

The Richards clip contains hints that he thinks he is playing a “character.” At one point, he asks the audience, “Does this shock you?” as if the “real” Richards is commenting on the behavior of his alter ego. This faux Lenny Bruce shtick also crashes and burns, leaving Richards to pace the stage like a low-rent version of Sam Kinison or Bill Hicks, two comedians who turned the outrageous rant into an art form.

What’s worse, rather than pull himself back from the precipice, Richards keeps going — perhaps hoping that he could improvise his way back into the audience’s good graces.

If you go to enough comedy clubs, you’ve seen this happen: A comic salvages a bad set by sheer force of will or outrageousness. The best example is Gilbert Gottfried’s legendary appearance at a Friars Club roast shortly after 9/11. The pint-sized comic (you might know him as the voice of the Aflac duck) told a World Trade Center joke that elicited groans and cries of “Too early!” Gottfried pressed on, however, telling his version of what is sometimes known as the world’s filthiest joke. The performance is included in last year’s documentary The Aristocrats: Gottfried’s routine is so crude, so offensive, that it enters into a sublime comic zone somewhere beyond language and meaning. The audience’s laughter becomes thunderous; those who were there remember it as the moment when they could finally let go of the fear, anxiety, and sadness they had been feeling since the terrorist attacks.

Richards had neither the skill nor the luck to pull off a similar trick. Does that excuse him? Hardly. But it helps put into perspective an event that has eclipsed discussion of much more important issues of race and tolerance in America. Richards is neither a politician nor a Hollywood power. He is not a cultural taste-maker. He is this generation’s McLean Stevenson, beloved for his role on a classic sitcom but unlucky in creating a second act.

For the same reasons, Richards also deserves more slack than Mel Gibson, another actor caught in a bigoted rant. Before being pulled over by Santa Monica police and drunkenly blaming the Jews, Gibson had, shall we say, a track record. His film The Passion of the Christ was perhaps the most successful 127 minutes of anti-Semitism in movie history. His response to his Jewish critics was uncharitable, at best, and his comments on his own father’s Holocaust denial were creepily unsatisfying. All that made his apologies for his roadside rage fall miles short of the mark.

Although undoubtedly coached by a high-priced publicity team, Richards still appears sincerely shaken by the incident. He didn’t say that the clip was taken out of context or blame liquor or “political correctness” for his troubles. The incident doesn’t represent a low point in race relations, as some commentators have suggested, but a vindication of the civil rights movement. Intended or not, bigotry is not a career move; it is the new scarlet letter.