Ted Danson says he will never stop apologizing for the 1993 roast of Whoopi Goldberg.
Danson famously attended the roast of Goldberg, with whom he’d formerly had an affair, in blackface, using racial slurs and joking about their sexual history on stage. The topic of the roast came up again Wednesday when Danson appeared on W. Kamau Bell’s podcast “Who’s With Me?” giving the star of “The Good Place” and “A Man on the Inside” the chance to apologize for the incident more than 30 years later.
“Every now and again, it pops up on the internet,” Bell said of the roast. “I’m sure you see it. New generations discover it.”
“I don’t because I’m not on the internet, but this is why I’m really glad we are talking about it,” Danson said. “With you, though.”
Danson repeatedly emphasized that, while he was explaining what was going through his head when he conceived of the act, he was not excusing the use of blackface or slurs from his younger self. He went on to say that the idea (approved and defended by Goldberg at the time) was born out of frustration from racially charged reporting on their affair from the press.
“I know what was in my heart, so I have no problem talking about this, 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 f–k? Wow, I feel betrayed. I feel angry,’ whatever. And I did that,” Danson said.
You can watch the full clip below.
Goldberg’s roast was one of the annual roasts at the New York Friars Club, with the events being more selective and secretive than the televised (or streamed) affairs you’ll see today. Danson said this allowed “the most vile, funny stuff” to be uttered by participants, while Bell called the blackface scandal a tipping point for the public’s awareness.
“Whoopi, I apologize if you’re listening to me talking, but Whoopi and I had had an affair and it was ending and we actually asked the Friars Club — we had already agreed to do it and then our relationship was ending — and we said, ‘Well, we should get out of this,’ and they said, ‘We will sue you,’” Danson said. “They had sold so many tickets.”
Danson said that he worked on the act for several months, trying to come up with a way to roast “one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world” after being told he could not back out of it.
“I’m not a standup,” he said. “I can’t run with the bulls.”
“The difference between being a comic actor and a comedian,” Bell replied.
“If the material’s funny, I can be funny,” Danson said. “So I was like, ‘Ugh, what am I going to do?’ and then I thought, Well, I can do performance theater. So I’ll 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’ll do it in blackface.”
“That this white guy could have something valuable to say about race and relations was so stupid and entitled,” he later added. “I thought, I can be Robin Williams. I can pull this off. I know it’s bold, but I can pull this off, and that was so arrogant and stupid on my part.”
