Ted Danson is apologizing for roasting onetime paramour Whoopi Goldberg while wearing blackface.
It was the fall of 1993 at the Friars Club in Manhattan, and the occasion was a roast of the “Sister Act” star, who at the time called Danson her “best friend.” Danson, fresh off the heels of an 11-season run on “Cheers,” and Goldberg, who was at the height of her film career, had been tangled up in a not-so-secret love affair that sprang up while filming “Made in America.” Danson was freshly split from his second wife, producer Cassandra Coates, who served him divorce papers after the tabloids outed his fling with Goldberg early that year.
To make matters messier, Danson and Goldberg’s romance was cooling off and the two actually tried to get out of the Friars roast, but the club said the tickets had been sold and the show must go on.
According to The Times’ archives, Goldberg said she wrote the racial-slur-laden monologue that Danson delivered wearing black minstrel makeup with exaggerated lips in white. On the podcast, Danson said he’d been preparing for the skit for months, sure he was going to nail it. “Within 20 seconds I was like, I stuck my finger in a light socket,” Danson told W. Kamau Bell on the “Who’s With Me?” podcast.
At least two among the more than 2,000 guests at the roast protested. TV talk show host Montel Williams walked out, and New York City Mayor David Dinkins left the event early.
“My brain was going: 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. I’m an actor; if the material is funny, I can be funny,” Danson said.
“And then I thought, well, I can do performance theater. 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, well, I will do it in blackface.”
Danson prefaced discussing the incident by saying that if he stammered throughout it was because it was uncomfortable talking about an affair he had when he was married, and that he’s been married to his third wife, Mary Steenburgen, for 32 years.
As for the blackface incident, “I have no problem talking about [it],” he said, adding that he wants to apologize for the rest of his life for the major flub. Although the incident happened more than three decades ago, internet fodder lasts forever, and Danson said he wanted to address it because somebody today can happen upon the incident online and think, “What the f—?”
Danson continued, “That this white guy could have something valuable to say about race and race relations was so stupid and entitled.”
He said he thought: “I know it’s bold, but I can pull this off, and that was so arrogant and stupid on my part. So off I go using all this horrendous language describing our love affair, while also in blackface. And I’d run it past Whoopi, and maybe she just didn’t want to squelch my creativity. … I worked for months, by the way, months.”
Earlier in the conversation, Bell told Danson that he he wanted to give him his flowers for knowing how to apologize in public. “How to say ‘oops.’”
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