Ted Danson vows to be “forever apologetic” for pulling a blackface stunt at a roast of then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg in 1993.
The “Cheers” alum regretfully reflected on the incident during an appearance on W. Kamau Bell’s “Who’s With Me?” on June 3. On the podcast, he praised Goldberg’s “arrogant” handling of the incident before admitting he was wrong.
“Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to gently and gracefully defend me for years,” he began. “So the last thing she probably wants is to be put in this position again.”
“I want to talk about this and forever apologize. I have no problem talking about this because I know what I was thinking in my heart. But I need and want to apologize for the rest of my life, because today someone might go on the internet and say, ‘Oh my god? Wow, I feel betrayed and I feel angry.’ And I did that,” Danson said.
At the time, relations with Goldberg were gradually cooling, and while they were trying to get out of the Roast, the Friars Club (which hosted the Roast) threatened to sue them if they left because they were “selling too many tickets.”
The actor then explained that it was his intention to do the exaggerated stunt in order to keep up with the comics in the room.
“So my brain was thinking, ‘Okay, here’s the most outrageously funny black woman in the world, at that point. And I’m supposed to grill her, but I’m not a stand-up and I can’t run with the bulls. I’m an actor at best,” he said.
“So I thought, ‘God, what do I do?'” And I thought, ‘Yes, I can do performance theater.’ ”
“I watched all these tapes and thought, “If I were black, I could say all these crazy things. I’m not.” And I thought, “I’m going to do it in blackface, and whether it’s funny or not, I’m going to be like, ‘I already have my license.”” Danson continued.
Danson noted that during this time, he and “The Color Purple” star constantly received negative comments from the press about their interracial relationship.
“It wasn’t because they liked each other or saw something in each other… It had to be pure sex. That’s the only reason for a relationship like this,” he said.
He specifically “fixated” on Goldberg’s statement that he didn’t care about people using the n-word because “offensive words” are not necessary to be racist.
“It was really shocking,” he recalled.
“I thought I could do this. There’s no whiter person in the world than me, and I thought this white person was stupid and entitled to say anything worthwhile about race and race relations. I thought, ‘Oh, I can be Robin Williams. I can step up and do this. I know it’s a bold thing to do, but I can do it.'” And that was so arrogant and stupid on my part. ”
However, despite working on this bit for “months”, things quickly went away “within 20 seconds” of his performance.
“It was like sticking my finger in a light socket,” he recalls.
At the time, Goldberg defended Danson’s blackface bit, which received public backlash.
“We weren’t trying to be politically correct. We were trying to make ourselves funny,” Goldberg said at a 1993 press conference, according to the Deseret News. She also admitted that she wrote most of Danson’s jokes herself and hired an artist to draw him in blackface.
The “View” co-host also read a statement from Danson that said, “There was too much love behind my words to be misconstrued as racist.”
