Wasn't Bob Ross also an Afro-American?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Michael Richards lost his fucking mind and peppered the audience, Dick Cheney style, with a smattering of racial slurs. What he's paying for, here, is that his comments weren't funny. There was clearly no joke behind them, and that makes an audience, especially one with actual "tinted Americans" in it, a li'l nervous. But what offends me in the clip above is Seinfeld telling Letterman's audience to stop laughing because "it isn't funny." Isn't it? It's not funny when an entertainer, whose career has been ironically crippled by its own success, has a total breakdown and starts doing David Duke impressions only to nervously apologize for them days later (the apology, of course, getting more laughs than Michael Richards' actual routine ever would)? Isn't Larry David working on a script like this every day? Weren't the awkward repercussions from one's personal quirks, fears, and problems the building blocks for your show, Jerry? COME ON! Won't somebody at least give me the small comfort in having the only good aspect of this ridiculously oversensitive society be the depths to which its celebrities must sink in order to gain forgiveness? Can't I at least have that? Can't I be allowed to laugh at Michael Richards for screwing up so badly that he is reduced to a quivering, teary-eyed baby in front of a national audience?

In unrelated news:

As I stood in Pennsylvania Station awaiting my train to Philadelphia on Saturday, I watched as an obese woman plodded down the corridor. As she passed, a single dime sprung from her fingers and fell to the marble floor with a distant tinkle (ooh! Urine from beyond the grave!). She hunched forward slightly, heaving her weighty skull over the precipice of her bosom just enough to get a decent view of the fallen coin. In less than a second, she determined, with a sort of strange weary familiarity, that the dime was lost forever. As she wandered off, I could only imagine a small fortune scattered about the streets and sidewalks of New York that this woman had somewhat begrudgingly donated because she was simply unable to reclaim it.