My take on Richards was that he took on the heckler.
When hecklers and their heckled engage, the tone is one of escalation. At the point of heckling, the heckler is in charge because he has stolen the show from the hecklee. He then has no choice but to take it back.
The heckle game is one of ping pong poison, and exaggeration is a huge component of humor.
He was to this point, as far as I can tell, doing his job with direction and deliberateness.
To tell a comedian, though, that he is flatly unfunny, is devastational to his core, a refutation of his very being. It is a grief made more grievous by the fact that comedians wear doubt like skin.
What is missing (to me, at least) was his performance up til the heckling started. If his delivery was sloppy and he was noninvested in his performance, and acted like he could care less, then the bro's have a point. This is what thrown tomatoes and heckling are for--giving a spirited response re the feeling one has when one spends big bucks and sees no return.
He used the word in a mocking way (though the initial utterance was key) trying, I think, to engage the audience to his side in besting the hecklers, offering in tone like a professor a-pacing, trying to turn on some heads in his class with stabbing stimulation, but this, his audience, already nervous that the brothers were acting out, and loudly, were quick to their absolute silence, spotted by a couple of gasps.
To be fair, white audiences have little choice in response to the use of the word nigger but with exaggerated gasps, especially when uttered by one of their own.
Tough for Richards on that point (racism is full of ricochets) as often happens when Whitey sidesteps from Whitey sidesteps from Whitey when THE word is raging in the air. It is always an 'you're-on-your-own' moment, when the chips are down, and the tone of the word itself now rings with a new timbre, rather than that heard amongst sniggling, giggling Whiteys, comfortably clatched in their common nonpigmentation.
The word nigger is an insult from white lips--white men are never addressed. This is why Blacks own the word.
And, just like when they invented vaudeville by aping spoiled belles after work, they choose to use the insult with complete straightface mockery--by using it with utmost affection to each other. This inside joke usually escapes Whitey, who plays it--playing it safe--innocently perplexed.
You either believe that he used the word because it slipped past his lips in a collapse of Sirs-like self betrayal, or he used it deliberately, repeating it often and loudly, to make a refuting point (strangely, for example, he punctuated the repeated nigger with "huh? huh?" as one does when is one if nudgingly demanding--"huh? how does that feel? huh? how does that feel?"
Could this be the truth of it? That he, brutalized to the marrow, was displaying the measure of his hurt by offering them same measure--the worst possible?
Everybody knows that when you really want to hurt a nigger, you call him a nigger.
Comedians often have a capacity for sudden degenerate exposures, and are prime movers in the world of self-destruction. For this alone I give him a pass. One remembers the recorded self-maulings, the piercing wailings by Shelley Berman. (Red Skelton? Red Skelton? I knew Red Skelton. And Shelley, you're no Red Skelton.)
And, to address all sides, the brothers were heckling and then, soon as the word came out, they changed tact, they seized and tolled the victim bell.
