Assignment 3 Takeaway

Prejudice is known as a feeling of dislike against an individual or group because of a characteristic, whether it be race or religion. In this case race was the characteristic that was used in this tirade that Michael Richards’ had at a comedy club.  His three-minute outburst was full of derogatory, racist comments that were aimed to hurt the audience members who made the statement “he was not funny.” The furious impulse of verbally attacking those individuals came from a prejudice towards a group, even if it deep in the subconscious. I learned from this assignment that what may have occurred was an example of priming where exposure to this certain stimulus influenced Richards to act a certain way.

    This applies to a topic that we learned in Chapter 3 about impressions. Richards is a big name in the show Seinfeld and under first impressions we get that the character he portrays Kramer who is a loveable character with a quirky personality. However, during this stand-up act he showed a side of himself that completely changed the way he is viewed. Lastly, I do not believe that this assignment was relevant to me. However, I did find it extremely hard to sit through this video without pausing a few times. The vulgarity of his words and certain things he said had me feeling angry and wondering why someone would say those things. I chose the image below because even though it is a cute little cartoon it shows prejudice as the bird has unnecessary malice towards the cat.