Ted Danson is once again confronting one of the most controversial moments of his career, saying he intends to keep apologizing for his 1993 blackface performance at a Friars Club roast honoring then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg.
Appearing on W. Kamau Bell’s Who’s With Me? podcast, the Cheers and The Good Place star reflected on the roast that shocked audiences at the time and continues to generate discussion more than 30 years later. “I need to and want to apologize for the rest of my life,” Danson said at around the 38:30 mark of the podcast. “Because somebody today can go on the internet and go, ‘What the f*ck? Wow, I feel betrayed, I feel angry.’ And I did that.”
The incident took place during a New York Friars Club charity roast for Goldberg, whom Danson was dating at the time. During the event, he appeared in blackface makeup and delivered a routine filled with racial slurs and explicit jokes about the couple’s relationship.
The performance drew immediate criticism from attendees, including former New York City Mayor David Dinkins and television personality Montel Williams, who famously walked out and later resigned from the Friars Club in protest.
Danson told Bell that he and Goldberg had hoped to avoid the roast altogether because their relationship was nearing its end, but backing out wasn’t an option after tickets had already been sold. Looking for a way to handle the assignment, he convinced himself he had found a creative solution.
“My brain was going, OK, here is one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world,” he recalled. “And I’m supposed to be roasting her, and I’m not a stand-up.”
That line of thinking eventually led him to what he now describes as a disastrous decision. “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 said. “I thought I could pull this off.”
Instead, he said, reality hit almost immediately. “Within 20 seconds, I was like, ‘I stuck my finger in a light socket,’” Danson recalled. “I thought I was doing a satire on mixed relationships, and I thought I was being edgy.”
The actor said he spent years telling himself that his intentions mattered but has since abandoned that justification. “Your intentions do not matter. The impact you have on people is what matters,” he said. “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.”
Danson also acknowledged the burden the controversy placed on Goldberg, who publicly defended him at the time and revealed that she had helped write much of the material. “Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully,” he said. “So, the last thing she probably wants to do is be put in this position again.”
Goldberg’s position has remained consistent. In the aftermath of the roast, she told reporters, “We were not trying to be politically correct. We were trying to be funny for ourselves.”
For Danson, however, the focus is no longer on explaining what happened but on accepting responsibility for it.
As he told Bell, “I apologize again to anyone who’s listening that I was arrogant enough to think that I had something to offer.”
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