<\/p>\n
Ted Danson<\/a> is apologizing for roasting onetime paramour Whoopi Goldberg<\/a> while wearing blackface. <\/p>\n It was the fall of 1993 at the Friars Club in Manhattan, and the occasion was a roast of the \u201cSister Act<\/a>\u201d star, who at the time called Danson her \u201cbest friend.\u201d Danson, fresh off the heels of an 11-season run on \u201cCheers,<\/a>\u201d 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 \u201cMade in America.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n To make matters messier, Danson and Goldberg\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n According to The Times\u2019 archives<\/a>, 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\u2019d been preparing for the skit for months, sure he was going to nail it. \u201cWithin 20 seconds I was like, I stuck my finger in a light socket,\u201d Danson told W. Kamau Bell on the \u201cWho\u2019s With Me?\u201d<\/a> podcast.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n \u201cMy brain was going: Here is one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world, and I\u2019m supposed to be roasting her, and I\u2019m not a stand-up. I can\u2019t run with the bulls. I\u2019m an actor; if the material is funny, I can be funny,\u201d Danson said. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd then I thought, well, I can do performance theater. I looked at all these tapes, and it\u2019s like, well if I were Black, I could say all these outrageous things, I\u2019m not. Then my mind went, well, I will do it in blackface.\u201d <\/p>\n 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\u2019s been married to his third wife, Mary Steenburgen, for 32 years.<\/p>\n As for the blackface incident, \u201cI have no problem talking about [it],\u201d 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, \u201cWhat the f\u2014?\u201d<\/p>\n Danson continued, \u201cThat this white guy could have something valuable to say about race and race relations was so stupid and entitled.\u201d <\/p>\n He said he thought: \u201cI know it\u2019s 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\u2019d run it past Whoopi, and maybe she just didn\u2019t want to squelch my creativity. … I worked for months, by the way, months.\u201d <\/p>\n Earlier in the conversation, Bell told Danson that he he wanted to give him his flowers for knowing how to apologize in public. \u201cHow to say \u2018oops.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u201cSister Act\u201d star, who at the time called Danson her \u201cbest friend.\u201d Danson, fresh off the heels of an 11-season run on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2444214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2444213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Ted-Danson-apologizing-for-blackface-roast-of-Whoopi-Goldberg.com2F3d2F722Fe9cc99504394b12f4c2e07f8.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2444213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2444215,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444213\/revisions\/2444215"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2444214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2444213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2444213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2444213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}