Ted Danson is ready to spend the rest of his life apologizing for his infamously offensive roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg more than three decades ago.
In 1993, the Cheers actor wore blackface at a celebrity roast of Goldberg at the New York Friars Club, where he served as the toastmaster and delivered a routine that included multiple uses of the n-word and disturbingly raunchy jokes.
Danson, 78, addressed the “stupid” and “hurtful” act during a recent appearance on W. Kamau Bell’s Who’s With Me? podcast, where he said he was sorry for the incident and said that he was willing to keep apologizing for it.
“I need to and I want to apologize for the rest of my life,” he said during Wednesday’s podcast episode. “Because somebody today can go on the internet and go, ‘What the f***? Yeah. Wow, I feel betrayed, I feel angry,’ and whatever. And I did that.”
Although Danson was legally married to Casey Coates at the time of the roast, he had been in a public romantic affair with Goldberg that ended weeks later after 18 months together.
Danson said on the podcast that the Sister Act star has defended him “sweetly and gracefully” in the years since the scandal, and went on to apologize directly to her.
“Whoopi, I apologize if you’re listening,” Danson said. “But Whoopi and I had an affair. And it was ending, and we actually asked the Friars Club; we’d already agreed to do it, and then our relationship was ending, and we said ‘Well, we should get out of this.’”
However, The Good Place star said the Friars Club had sold too many tickets so they could not back out. He said he prepared the routine for months with Goldberg’s help, and that the jokes were not meant to be malicious, but were supposed to mock the media coverage of their short-lived relationship.
“The press and the news was not the healthiest — news were going after us, you know, mixed race and affair,” he said. “It couldn’t be because they liked each other or saw something in each other. It had to be sex. It had to be just pure sex. That’s the only reason for a relationship like this. And there was a lot of mean.”
“So my brain was going, okay, 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,” he recalled, adding: “I worked for months on this, by the way, months.”
In hindsight, Danson said the decision was “so stupid and entitled.”
“I thought I could pull this off,” he said. He added that he got on stage and thought at the time, “Twenty percent of the crowd gets this and thinks it's pretty cool and gets it. Thirty percent of the crowd gets it and f***ing hates it. Fifty percent of the crowd didn't get it and f***ing hated it and hated me. And I kept going.”
Goldberg, who said after the roast that she helped Danson write the material and find the makeup artist for the blackface, did not immediately return The Independent’s request for comment.
Danson acknowledged that The View co-host had approved his jokes beforehand and defended him after the backlash, but he still recognized that the performance was a bad decision due to the widespread backlash that it brought against him.
“I am forever apologetic,” he said. “The other thing I used to say for the longest time, ‘I knew what my intention was. My intention was love.’ [But] it doesn't matter. Your intentions do not matter. The impact you have on people is what matters. And if you haven't thought through that, then you need to.”
He concluded: “It was stupid, and it was not my place. And it was wrong, and it was hurtful. So I apologize again for, to anyone who’s listening, that I was arrogant enough to think that I had something to offer.”
