Ted Danson has said he will be apologising for “the rest of my life” after appearing in blackface at a 1993 Whoopi Goldberg Friars Club roast.
The Curb Your Enthusiasm actor appeared on Wednesday’s (June 3) episode of W. Kamau Bell’s Who’s With Me? podcast, and said he needed and wanted to make amends, “because somebody today can go on the internet and go, ‘What the fuck? Wow, I feel betrayed, I feel angry.’ And I did that.”
Danson’s speech at the event, which drew instantaneous backlash from those in attendance, including from public figures like former New York City Mayor David Dinkins, took place while he and Goldberg were having an affair and included racial slurs and jokes about their sex life.
Shedding further light on the incident, he explained that their relationship was coming to an end, and while he had tried to get out of the roast, the Friars Club said they would sue. Laughing while recalling the story, Danson said it was because they had “sold so many tickets”.
“I will explain what was going on in my head, not as an excuse,” he went on. “My brain was going, ‘OK, here is one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world’. And I’m supposed to be roasting her, and I’m not a stand-up, I can’t run with the bulls.
“So I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’ And then I thought, ‘Well I can do performance theatre.’ 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; [but] 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.’”
And he said that he “kind of latched on” to something Goldberg had previously said about not caring if people use the N-word because people didn’t have to “use nasty language” to be racist.
“I thought I could pull this off,” he added. “There’s no one been whiter than me in the world. That I thought that this white guy could have something valuable to say about race and race relations was so stupid and entitled.”
During his months of working on the bit, he ran it past Goldberg, he recalled, but suggested that she didn’t want to step on his creativity. The negative reaction was instant: “Within 20 seconds,” he said, “I was like, ‘I stuck my finger in a light socket.’
“Twenty percent of the crowd gets this and thinks it’s pretty cool and gets it. Thirty percent of the crowd gets it and fucking hates it. Fifty percent of the crowd didn’t get it and fucking hated it and hated me. And I kept going,” Danson recalled, adding that when he returned to his hotel he had to get on the phone with Mayor Dinkins.
“My poor manager said he couldn’t open the door into his hotel room because there were so many messages stuck under the door,” said Danson, whose justification was that he knew what his intention has been.
However, he said the impact he had on people is what mattered. “And if you haven’t thought through that, then you need to. 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. So I apologize again to anyone who’s listening, that I was arrogant enough to think that I had something to offer.”
Back in 1993, Goldberg told The New York Times the situation “caused great hurt to a man who doesn’t deserve it.”
On the podcast, Danson offered another apology to Goldberg, saying: “Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully. So the last thing she probably wants to do is be put in this position again.”
He went on to say that after clips of the routine surfaced during the Black Lives Matter movement, he “got dropped a little bit from some corporate things”, and was “scared” as a result.
Jane Fonda then connected him with The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together author Heather McGhee, who helped him reflect on his actions: “She wasn’t giving me a pass,” he explained. “She was saying, ‘This is an opportunity that I hope you take.'”
Bell said that he had asked Danson if there was anything he didn’t want to talk about and gave him “credit” for speaking about the blackface incident.