Some years ago at a party, I met an actor who played a doctor on a network soap opera. The character he played was embroiled in a nasty custody fight which was part of a nasty divorce. The actor said that he was often approached in his off-screen life by women who implored him to do whatever he had to do to make sure that Karen, his on-screen soon-to-be ex-wife, didn’t get custody of their child. At first, the actor (whose name I no longer recall) said that would explain to the fans that he was an actor, and that the doctor and everybody else on the show were just characters. After several incidents, however, their reactions—disbelief, anger, sadness—persuaded him that it was important to at least some of his fans that he not just portray the doctor, but that he be the doctor, responding to fans in character, and assuring them that he was doing everything he could to keep custody.

I thought about that doctor—I mean, that actor—as I watched unfolding coverage of the unraveling of Michael Richards, the actor who played Kramer on Seinfeld.

Almost all the early Richards coverage sounded a note of near-disbelief. Except for its anger, Richards’ tirade would have fit right in to any number of late-night cable comedy slots. But it seemed somehow unexpected from Richards. How could someone we thought we knew erupt so suddenly into a tirade of hate and vituperation?

But of course we don’t know Michael Richards at all. Not as in “We thought we knew him, but we obviously didn’t really know him at all.” We actually don’t know Michael Richards, don’t know who he is, until recently didn’t, for the most part, even recognize his name—any more than the soap opera fans knew the actor who played a doctor. Even some Seinfeld fans, asked what they thought of what Richards had done, responded, “Who?”

The person we knew, of course, was Cosmo Kramer, the way you know someone in whose company you’ve spent ninety hours over nine years—about the time you’d spend with someone you met for lunch about once a month over that period.

This is a recurring illusion, our belief that we know someone based on the character they play on TV or in the movies. We were shocked to read, during Katie Couric’s last year on the Today show, that she had thrown her weight around off—shocked because we assumed that she was the character she played for two hours every morning. I remember hearing an interview in which actor and comedian Steve Landesberg was asked if he was a lot like the character he played on the Barney Miller sitcom, Sgt. Arthur Dietrich, an erudite polymath. No resemblance, Landesberg replied, to my disillusionment. Dietrich knows something about almost everything, said Landesberg. The only parts of the newspaper I ever read, he said, are the sports and show business sections.

I remember another interview, with comedian Henny Youngman, who styled himself the king of one-line jokes—“Take my wife. Please.” Do people ever come up to you, the interviewer asked the comic, and want you to say something funny? They do, replied Youngman. What they don’t understand, he said, is that I’m not a funny person in my everyday life. I’m someone who writes and tells jokes in ways that make people laugh. (Asked how he dealt with the recurring problem, he said that he had started carrying pictures of Pride furniture polish and Joy dishwashing liquid in his wallet. When people asked him to say something funny, he would take out his wallet and say, “Have I shown you a picture of my pride and joy?”)

There’s something endearing, something quintessentially American, something not unlike the legal system’s presumption of innocence, about our assumption that people are what they appear to be until and unless proven otherwise. And it’s not completely surprising that we extend such a presumption of authenticity to people we know only as fictional characters, or to people whose profession involves the projection of manufactured or processed personae. Our willingness to believe in them as real people is, after all, the object of their efforts.

It’s just a bit troubling that, between people we know in real life and people we see on TV, we’re not always completely clear on the difference.