The former Cheers star Ted Danson is speaking out this week to say that he wants to “apologize forever” for wearing blackface during a 1993 roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg.
Danson Wants To ‘Apologize Forever’
“I would like to address this and apologize forever,” Danson, 78, told W. Kamau Bell on his “Who’s With Me?” podcast on Wednesday.
“I have no problem talking about this,” he continued. “But I need to and want to apologize for the rest of my life because somebody today can go on the internet, you’re right, and go, ‘What the [expletive]? Wow, I feel betrayed. I feel angry’ and whatever. And I did that.”
The controversial roast took place at the elite private Friars Club in New York City. As someone who has never been a standup comedian, Danson claims to have felt intimidated at the thought of roasting Goldberg.
“I will explain what was going on in my head, not as an excuse,” he said. “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, ‘What am I gonna do?’ And then I thought, ‘Well I can do performance theater,'” Danson recalled. “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.’”
Danson Thought He ‘Could Pull This Off’
Danson went on to say that he “kind of latched on” to something Goldberg had said in her own standup comedy act about not caring if people use the n-word because people didn’t have to “use nasty language” to be racist.
“I thought I could pull this off,” he remembered. “There’s no one been whiter than me in the world. That I thought that this white guy could have something valuable to say about race and race relations was so stupid and entitled.”
Danson spent months working on this bit. He even ran it by Goldberg, who seemingly took no issue with it. As soon as Danson took the stage in blackface on the night of the roast, however, he realized that he’d made a huge mistake.
“Within 20 seconds, I was like, ‘I stuck my finger in a light socket,’” he lamented.
“Twenty percent of the crowd gets this and thinks it’s pretty cool and gets it,” Danson added. “Thirty percent of the crowd gets it and [expletive] hates it. Fifty percent of the crowd didn’t get it and [expletive] hated it and hated me. And I kept going.”
The Roast’s Aftermath
Afterwards, Danson returned to his hotel. There, he recounted that his “poor manager said he couldn’t open the door into his hotel room because there were so many messages stuck under the door.”
Danson attempted to justify what he’d done by telling himself that his intentions were pure.
“My intention was love,” he said. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Your intentions do not matter. The impact you have on people is what matters,” Danson concluded. “And if you haven’t thought through that, then you need to. I thought I could run with the big boys, and I couldn’t. And it was stupid, and it was not my place, and it was wrong and it was hurtful. So I apologize again to anyone who’s listening, that I was arrogant enough to think that I had something to offer.”
Check out Danson’s full comments on this in the video below.
Danson and Goldberg broke up days after the roast. They had been dating for around 18 months at the time of their split. In the decades since then, photos from the roast showing Danson in blackface and Goldberg laughing hysterically at his antics have repeatedly come back to haunt them both.
These days, both Danson and Goldberg are far-left Democrats who would have no mercy on any Republican caught wearing blackface at any time. Perhaps they should both think about the racial skeletons in their own respective closets before they cast judgement on the past actions of others.