Ted Danson said he will “apologize for the rest of my life” over a roast of Whoopi Goldberg he did in blackface in 1993.
Speaking on W. Kamau Bell’s podcast “Who’s With Me?,” the “Cheers” and “The Good Place” actor opened up about the incident, which occurred at the New York Friars Club while he was romantically linked with Goldberg. Danson’s roast at the private event included racial slurs and jokes about the pair’s sex life, which drew backlash from those in attendance as well as public figures like David N. Dinkins, New York City’s first Black mayor.
“I need to and want to apologize for the rest of my life because somebody today can go on the internet and go, ‘What the fuck? Wow, I feel betrayed, I feel angry.’ And I did that,” Danson said.
He admitted that their affair was coming to an end and they had tried to get out of the roast, but it wasn’t possible because the Friars Club had “sold so many tickets.”
“So my brain was going, OK, here is one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world. And I’m supposed to be roasting her and I’m not a stand-up, I can’t run with the bulls. So I was like, ‘God, what am I gonna do?'” Danson said. “And then I thought, ‘Well I can do performance theater.’ And I looked at all these tapes and it’s like, well if I were Black, I could say all these outrageous things. I’m not; then my mind went, I will do it in blackface and that will be funny or not, but it will be like, ‘I have license now.’ … I thought I could pull this off.”
