Ted Danson's 33-Year Apology: Why One Joke Still Haunts Him

Some mistakes don’t fade with time—they just get louder. Ted Danson learned that the hard way in 1993 when he performed blackface at Whoopi Goldberg’s roast, and three decades later, he’s still reckoning with it.

Speaking on W. Kamau Bell’s“Who’s With Me”podcast on Tuesday, June 2, the 78-year-old Cheers star opened up about the moment that’s followed him ever since. His framing was honest and unflinching: he doesn’t plan to stop apologizing. Not ever. Because every day, someone discovers that video online for the first time, feels the sting of it, and has every right to be angry.

Here’s the setup that led him there. Danson and Goldberg, now 70, were dating at the time, but their relationship was ending. Both tried to back out of the Friars Club event, but neither could escape it. Danson, who had no standup experience, found himself panicking. How do you roast“one of the most outrageous, funny, Black women in the world”when you’re not a comedian and can’t keep pace with the room? His brain landed on a terrible answer: if he were Black, he could say outrageous things. So he’d use blackface as a performance device—a shortcut to comedy he didn’t actually possess.

He spent months working on the bit. Then, 20 seconds in, he knew. Twenty percent of the crowd got it. Thirty percent hated it. Fifty percent didn’t understand it and hated him for it. And he kept going.

What strikes you about Danson’s recent comments isn’t defensiveness or minimization. It’s the opposite. He calls his thinking“so arrogant and stupid,”acknowledges he was trying to perform theater rather than comedy, and recognizes that Goldberg—who ran the material beforehand—probably just didn’t want to crush his creativity. But what haunts him most? That Goldberg has had to defend him“over the years, sweetly and gracefully,”when the last thing she probably wanted was to be put in that position again.

That’s the real weight of it. A moment intended as comedy created a burden for someone else to carry. Thirty-three years later, that’s what he’s still apologizing for—not just the act itself, but the ongoing harm it inflicted on the person closest to him at the time.