I stumbled upon an intriguing news report recently. Don Kaplan of the New York Post writes:

THE K-K-Kramer scandal murdered Michael Richards’ career - but it’s doing wonders for sales of the latest "Seinfeld" DVD.

Season 7 of the popular sitcom is outselling the Season 6 set (released on the same day last year) by more than 75 percent, and more than 90 percent over season 5 at some online DVD retailers, according to TMZ.com.

On Barnes and Nobel’s Web site, the DVD set is the sixth-best selling and Amazon ranks it in 12th place. [It's now in 17th place -- Mike.]

"I think the only explanation that could be is that there’s a Kramer curiosity factor," says Dr. Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television.

"I can understand that, after what happened, there’s a resurgent interest in ‘Seinfeld,’ and that seems to be expressing itself through people watching the show more and buying more DVDs….

A video-phone recording of Richards exploding in a hateful, racist rant while performing his stand-up comedy act earlier this month leaked onto the Internet just days before the season 7 DVD set was released.

Hmm. So the guerrilla footage of Richards’ epithet-laden tirade was released "just days" before the DVD release, eh? Gee, that doesn’t sound terribly coincidental. In fact, given all of these celebrity foul-ups of late — Nicole Richie’s DUI, Britney Spears’ snatch shots, etc. — as well as Jerry Seinfeld’s perfectly timed appearance on David Letterman immediately following the release of the cell-phone capture, I have almost no doubt Richards let loose on purpose, to drive attention to his former show and its recent DVD release.

Yes, I’m that cynical, but not at cynical as Richards and whoever else was involved in this unfortunate stab at publicity. For one, Seinfeld doesn’t need to stoop to these sick promotional stunts because a show that great speaks for itself. If Sony, the distributor of the DVD package, wanted to increase exposure of its product, it should have taken out a few extra ads. It’s not like television program DVD sets are generally poor sellers, especially when the program is question is an iconic one like Seinfeld.

And speaking of cynicism, this incident isn’t only indicative of hype borne from desperation. Comedy, in general, has been veering toward the more hateful and shocking for awhile now. Which gives me the perfect opportunity to talk about the Comedy Festival that took place at Caesars Palace four weeks ago.

I’m not as big a comedy fan as most people. Sure, I love to laugh, but I’m the type of person who busts up more from real life hijinks, blunders and one-liners than the rehearsed bits from comedians and actors. Before the Comedy Festival last month, the only stand-up performance I’d ever attended was that of Margaret Cho a few years ago. And I don’t typically watch stand-up on television or DVD, the exception being Cho and Chris Rock. I know relatively nothing about the Kings of Comedy, the blue collar comics (Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, etc.), Dane Cook or any other recent stand-up phenomenon. I mean, whatever.

I took in three different stand-up presentations during the Comedy Festival: An hour-plus concert by politically incorrect figurehead Bill Maher; a bill with Sarah Silverman and some of her comedian buds; and Comic Relief, a four-hour comedy showcase-telethon aimed at getting cash over to hurricane-devastated New Orleans.

There were no surprises at the Maher concert. Any of the attendees familiar with his shtick — socially and politically biting commentary, mostly from a progressive/liberal point of view — got exactly what they expected, as Maher delivered the goods employing neither gimmick nor sensationalism. That doesn’t mean he didn’t seethe against his enemies; his vehemence toward outspoken Christian figures and Bush’s cronies was positively hateful. It’s probably why Maher only filled about two-thirds of Caesars’ Colosseum, which probably accounted for all the politically interested people in Vegas at that time, or maybe just all of its left-leaning people.

I knew beforehand Silverman would be offensive. I happened to catch her Jesus is Magic movie, perhaps the most ill-conceived stand-up film I’ve ever taken in, but I thought maybe if she limited herself to just stand-up, she’d be more watchable. And she was. But after seeing Comic Relief just hours before, Silverman failed to sincerely shock, and when her racially and politically insensitive material lacks in true outrageousness — much of her ethnic "satire" that night had been recycled from other sources, including Jesus is Magic — she’s sort of impotent. In fact, she was more or less upstaged by her support talent: Brian Posehn, formerly a cast member of NBC’s Just Shoot Me, and Zach Galifianakis, who was far and away my favorite new comedic discovery of the festival, and who sent up both the musical Annie and the classic Bob Dylan Subterranean Homesick Blues video short in his sidesplitting closing number.

Then there was Comic Relief. Now, I figured, OK, it’s an HBO special, and even though it airs in the early evening on the West Coast, the humor would be relatively blue. Just a half-hour into the ha-ha marathon, it proved to be not only exceedingly blue in terms of the potty-mouth content, but in its political leanings. You’d have been hard pressed to find a participant that didn’t rip into Republicans or the current administration; I’m willing to bet many of the early exits during the first half of the show were red staters who probably felt alienated and/or irritated by the barrage of anti-GOP, anti-Christian Right and anti-Bush screeds.

Now, I’m hardly complaining. I am an unabashed liberal. And, hey, it’s nice to finally be rid of the Clinton/Lewinsky jokes and see the chief on the other side of the aisle get skewered. However, I have to say, it did get a little monotonous after awhile. I swear I heard repeat jokes from different participants.

Comedians didn’t limit their rage toward the politicians who deserved it — and given that Hurricane Katrina loomed over the entire proceedings, it was entirely justified. Furthermore, for each social demographic that was poked fun at, there was an undercurrent of racial tension being relieved, if only because the comedians were daring to address it. Sure, every Mexican stereotype was thrown out, given how frequently the issue of immigration came up, but no one using them were doing anything less than completely defending the immigrant position. If there was a breakaway favorite among the long list of participants at Comic Relief, it was George Lopez, who absolutely killed with his uproarious five-minute set on current border-control controversies. I had no idea the guy with the obligatory Latin-themed sitcom was so hysterically funny, and I got the feeling I wasn’t alone.

Still, subtlety has become a lost art — the only comedian who seemed to exercise it while still making a point was Billy Crystal, who took on the character of a down-and-out (and maybe a little angry) Big Easy musician with remarkable poignancy — and it forces people like Richards to resort to extreme and use epithets. Maybe comedians feel that’s what you have to do to get people’s attention these days. Maybe they feel the only way to up previous comedy/stand-up masters like Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor is to overcompensate with shock antics; even Howard Stern seems tame when it comes to racial exploitation. Even Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat character seems to be buffoon-heavy in his social satire, because, really, if his movie hadn’t played up the ethnic yucks to the degree it did, would it have made $120 million dollars. I sincerely doubt it. And perhaps the Comic Relief producers saw the same logic and decided to ratchet up their own brand of comedic hate. At least it was usually farcical. What’s Richards defense? He doesn’t have one. But I bet his back-end DVD royalty deal is pretty sweet.