After more than 30 years, Ted Danson has had much time to reflect on his controversial moment at Whoopi Goldberg‘s 1993 roast.
The 3x Emmy winner recently emphasized that he is “forever apologetic” for doing blackface in his appearance at New York’s Friars Club, explaining he “thought I was being edgy” in making a satirical joke about their interracial affair during the roast.
“Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully,” he prefaced on the Who’s With Me? podcast. “So the last thing she probably wants to do is be put in this position again.”
Danson added, “I would like to address this and apologize forever. 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 and go, ‘What the fuck? Wow, I feel betrayed, I feel angry.’ And I did that.”
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Noting that he and Goldberg had an affair that was ending around the time of the roast, Danson recalled they tried to get out of the event, but the Friars Club threatened to sue them because they “had sold so many tickets.”
“So my brain was going, ‘OK, here is one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world, at that point. 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 at best,’” he explained.
“So I was like, ‘God, what am I gonna do?’ And then I thought, ‘Well I can do performance theater,’” said Danson. “And 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 continued, “I thought I could pull this off. I thought that, there’s no one been whiter than me in the world, that this white guy could have something valuable to say about race and race relations was so stupid and entitled. I thought, ‘Oh, I can be Robin Williams. I can step up, and 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.”
After working “for months” on the bit, “within 20 seconds,” it went south. “It was like I stuck my finger in a light socket,” he recounted.
Goldberg defended Danson at the time, and she later admitted to writing most of the jokes herself, motivated by the public’s racism around their relationship. “We were not trying to be politically correct. We were trying to be funny for ourselves,” she said in a statement.