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‘Cheers’ star apologizes for blackface stunt at Whoopi roast more than three decades later

June 5, 2026 | | Print Article

Actor Ted Danson had something that he wanted to get off his chest. The “Cheers” star has apologized for a tasteless blackface stunt at a roast for comic Whoopi Goldberg that took place more than three decades ago.

During the October 1993 event at the New York Friars Club, Danson delivered a monologue while wearing a top hat with his face painted black with a large white circle around his mouth, skewering Goldberg with whom he had an interracial relationship, making crude jokes about their sex life and her anatomy.

The tasteless routine was so offensive to host Montel Williams that he “stormed off the dais at the roast,” The New York Times recalled, and then-Big Apple Mayor David Dinkins, who is black, described Danson’s jokes as “way, way over the line.”  Goldberg, who would later go on to become one of the co-hosts on “The View,” has defended her ex-boyfriend.

Now 78 years old, Danson is apologizing for the offensive stunt.

“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, you’re right, and go, ‘What the f**k? Wow, I feel betrayed. I feel angry,’ and whatever. And I did that,” Danson said during a conversation with W. Kamau Bell on the comic’s “Who’s With Me?” podcast.

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“That was so arrogant and stupid on my part,” he added in his belated mea culpa for the insensitive appearance that has dogged him for more than thirty years.

“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,” he said. “And I’m not a stand-up. I can’t run with the bulls,” Danson said, recalling what was in his mind at the time.

“Well, if I were black, I could say all these outrageous things,” he continued. “I’m not. Then, my mind went, well, I will do it in blackface. That will be funny or not, but it’ll, like, be — oh, I have license to.”

“I thought I could pull this off. There’s no one that’s been whiter than me in the world,” the “Cheers” star added, also apologizing to Goldberg.

“Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully,” Danson said, also recalling the reaction to the off-color routine, which, as he described it, was a major blunder.

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“Within 20 seconds, I was like, I stuck my finger in a light socket,” he told the host.

As the nation’s racial discourse took a turn for the toxic during the Obama years, unearthed pictures and videos of a person wearing blackface were a guaranteed career killer – that is, unless you happened to be a liberal celebrity who carries water for the Democratic Party.

“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**king hates it. Fifty percent of the crowd didn’t get it and f**king hated it and hated me. And I kept going,” Danson recalled of the reaction at the time. “My poor manager said he couldn’t open the door into his hotel room because there were so many messages stuck under the door.”

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Chris Donaldson
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