More than 30 years after a celebrity roast became a career stain instead of a comedy night, Ted Danson is speaking about it with regret.
On W. Kamau Bell’s podcast Who’s With Me?, the former Cheers star apologized for his actions at a 1993 New York Friars Club roast honoring Whoopi Goldberg. Danson, now 78, appeared in blackface and repeatedly used a racial slur during a routine that also included sexual jokes about Goldberg, whom he was dating at the time.
“I need to and want to apologize for the rest of my life,” Danson said.
During the roast, Montel Williams walked off the dais, then-New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins said the material went “way, way over the line,” and the Friars Club’s dean later apologized.
Danson told Bell that the situation was already complicated before he ever stepped onstage. He said he and Goldberg had tried to pull out of the roast because their affair was ending, but hundreds of tickets had already been sold. The actor said he spent months preparing, while convincing himself that a terrible idea could somehow work.
“Well, if I were Black, I could say all these outrageous things,” he said. “I’m not. Then, my mind went, well, I will do it in blackface.”
Danson admitted that he was out of his depth as a performer in that setting.
“I’m not a stand-up,” he continued. “I can’t run with the bulls.”
Looking back, Danson called his conduct “arrogant and stupid,” and said Goldberg had been left to answer for him far too often.
“Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully,” he said, adding that it only took him 20 seconds into the roast to realize that he had messed up, big time.
