More than 30 years after one of Hollywood's most criticized moments, Ted Danson addressed it directly. The three-time Emmy winner appeared on the Who's With Me? podcast to apologize for performing in blackface at Whoopi Goldberg's 1993 Friars Club roast in New York City.
Danson said he has carried the weight of the moment ever since. "Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully," he said on the podcast. "So the last thing she probably wants to do is be put in this position again."
He did not stop there. "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."
Danson explained how the decision came about. He and Goldberg were in a relationship at the time that was ending, and they had tried to back out of the roast entirely. According to Danson, the Friars Club threatened to sue them because they "had sold so many tickets." Feeling trapped, and aware he was not a natural stand-up comedian, he said his mind searched for a way to match the energy of the room.
"So I was like, 'God, what am I gonna do?' And then I thought, 'Well I can do performance theater,'" he said. His reasoning, as he explained it, was that performing in blackface would give him license to say the kinds of things a Black comedian could say at such an event.
He described working on the material for months, only for it to collapse almost immediately. "Within 20 seconds," it went south. "It was like I stuck my finger in a light socket," he said. His conclusion about his own thinking at the time was blunt: "I thought I could pull this off... And that was so arrogant and stupid on my part."
Goldberg had defended Danson publicly at the time. She later said she had written most of the jokes herself, motivated by the racism the couple had faced publicly because of their interracial relationship. "We were not trying to be politically correct. We were trying to be funny for ourselves," she said in a statement at the time.
Danson's appearance on the podcast, according to Deadline, marks one of his most direct public reckonings with the incident since it occurred.
