Ted Danson stumbled over his words as he recounted the blackface and N-word stunt he pulled more than three decades ago to roast his then-girlfriend, Whoopi Goldberg, on Wednesday.
“It’s just difficult when you’re talking about having had an affair with somebody while you were married, you know, and you’ve been now married for 32 years,” he began on the latest episode of Who’s With Me? with W. Kamau Bell. “So if I stutter a little bit, it’s a little bit because of that.”
Danson was married to his then-wife, producer Cassandra “Casey” Coates, when he began a public affair with Goldberg in 1992. He and Coates divorced in 1993, and he remarried actress Mary Steenburgen in 1995. But his affair with Goldberg—and his infamous choice to participate in the New York Friars Club roast while wearing blackface in 1993—has followed him.
“Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully,” Danson told Bell, “So the last thing she probably wants to do is have this, you know... be put in this position again.”
He insisted on apologizing for the incident, however: “I need to and want to apologize for the rest of my life because somebody today can go on the internet, you’re right, and go, ‘What the f---?’”
“Whoopi, I apologize if you’re listening,” Danson continued. “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.’” The Friars Club had “sold so many tickets,’” and there was no escape, Danson said.
“They said, ‘We will sue you,’” he explained.
Danson decided he was going to do the roast and put his all into it after facing months of media scrutiny for the affair, which centered on Goldberg’s race.
“The press and the news was not the healthiest—news were going after us, you know, mixed race and affair. 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,” he recalled.
“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.”
Danson insisted that his “intention” in donning Blackface and using the N-word during the roast wasn’t malicious.
“I worked for months on this, by the way, months,” he said of his ill-fated act. “There’s no one whiter than me in the world,” he said, but he still thought at the time, “This white guy could have something valuable to say about race and race relations.”
He called the mindset, in hindsight, “so stupid and entitled.”
Danson said he’d cleared the act with Whoopi ahead of the show. “I’d run it past Whoopi and all of that. And maybe she just didn’t want to squelch my creativity,” he said.
Goldberg later said during the controversy that she had written some of the offensive jokes for Danson and had even hired his makeup artist for the blackface.
“So off I go using all this horrendous language, describing our love affair, while also in blackface,” Danson said. He thought he was being “edgy,” but knew as soon as he appeared on stage that he’d misstepped.
“And within 20 seconds, I was like, I stuck my finger in a light socket and just...and I went OK,” he said. “Twenty percent of the crowd—and this was a packed house—20 percent of the crowd gets this, 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.”
Danson recalled that talk show host Montel Williams, who is Black, got up and walked out before he’d even finished: “I think it’s OK to say Montel Williams went out and didn’t show while we were still, while I was, you know, as I was finally...”
“As you’re still getting to the closing,” Bell offered.
Danson said that his current wife didn’t “get” what he was trying to do either: “Over the years, because I have to throw Mary into this because it affects Mary, that I’m saying this, Mary was sweet and gentle with me, but early on, just couldn’t understand… she had done all this work, civil rights work, and this and that, and she couldn’t understand it. So I don’t think that anyone associated with me got it.”
The Emmy-winning actor said the incident came back to haunt him over the past few years. “When Black Lives Matter surfaced,” he said, “I think it came out in the press a little bit that... somebody brought it up, and I got dropped a little bit from certain things, corporate things, and I was scared.”
“I am forever apologetic,” he continued of the ordeal. “And the other thing I used to say for the longest time, ‘I knew what my intention was. My intention was love.’”
He has a different understanding now, he said. “It doesn’t matter. Your intentions do not matter. The impact you have on people is what matters,” he said. “You did it. And you’ve had this impact.”
“It was stupid, and it was not my place. And it was wrong, and it was hurtful,” he concluded. “So I apologize again for, to anyone who’s listening, that I was arrogant enough to think that I had something to offer.”
