Actor Ted Danson says he will apologize "for the rest of my life" for his 1993 blackface performance during a Friars Club roast of then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg, a stunt he now calls arrogant, hurtful, and wrong.
Danson made the remarks on W. Kamau Bell's podcast "Who's with Me?" in what amounted to his most extended public reckoning with the incident, which generated immediate controversy more than three decades ago and has resurfaced periodically ever since. Breitbart reported on Danson's podcast appearance, detailing his explanation and apology.
The "Cheers" star's comments raise a question that conservative Americans have asked for years: Why do Hollywood's most outspoken progressives get to live by a different set of rules than the ones they impose on everyone else?
Danson told Bell he wanted to explain "what was going on in my head, not as an excuse." What followed was a lengthy account of how the performance came together, and how badly it landed.
He described the situation: his relationship with Goldberg was already ending, and they felt unable to back out of the Friars Club roast. Danson said he was not a standup comedian and felt outmatched by the occasion.
"Okay, here is one of the most outrageous, funny, Black women in the world at that point. I'm supposed to be roasting her. And I'm not a standup. I can't run with the bulls."
So he decided, in his words, to do "performance theater." He said watching Black comedians at the event made him think that if he were Black, he would be able to "say all these outrageous things." He also said he wanted to confront the public cruelty directed at his interracial relationship with Goldberg.
"It couldn't be because they liked each other or saw something in each other.... It had to be just pure sex, that's the only reason for a relationship like this."
Danson said he ran the bit by Goldberg beforehand and rehearsed it for months. He thought the performance would stay inside the room. It didn't. He said the controversy was public before the event even ended.
Danson offered a blunt self-assessment of how the audience received the act, breaking it down in percentages that tell their own story.
"20% of the crowd gets this and thinks it's pretty cool and gets it. 30% of the crowd gets it and f***ing hates it. 50% of the crowd didn't get it and f***ing hated it and hated me."
"And I kept going," he added.
Eighty percent of the room either hated the performance or hated him for doing it. By his own math, the act was a disaster in real time. He pressed on anyway.
Danson said he felt compelled to keep addressing the incident because anyone today can find it online and feel "betrayed" or "angry."
"I would like to address this is 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, you're right, and go, 'What the f***? Wow. I feel betrayed. I feel angry and whatever.' And I did that."
He also apologized directly to Goldberg, not for the act itself, but for putting her in a position where she had to defend him over the years.
"The last thing she probably wants to do is have [to] be put in this position again."
Perhaps the most revealing moment came when Danson abandoned the defense he said he had relied on for years, that his intentions were good.
"... The other thing I used to say for the longest time, 'I knew what my intention was. My intention was love.' It doesn't matter. Your intentions do not matter. The impact you have on people is what matters. And if you haven't thought through that, then you need to."
He concluded with a final admission:
"I thought I could run with the big boys and I couldn't, and it was stupid and it was not my place and it was wrong and it was hurtful. I apologize again to anyone who's listening that I was arrogant enough to think that I had something to offer."
Danson's apology may be sincere. It may even be overdue. But it lands in a culture that his own side of the political aisle has shaped, one where blackface, no matter the context, is treated as a career-ending offense. Governors have faced resignation calls. Television hosts have been fired. College students have been expelled from organizations. The standard, as progressives have defined it, is absolute: blackface is always wrong, full stop, no exceptions for satire, roasts, or good intentions.
And yet Danson continued working steadily in Hollywood for more than three decades after the Friars Club incident. No boycott stuck. No studio dropped him. No streaming platform pulled his catalog. He kept getting cast, kept collecting awards-show invitations, and kept his place in the industry's good graces.
Compare that to the treatment of figures outside Hollywood's progressive circle. In 2020, radio host Howard Stern faced public backlash after a video clip surfaced showing him in blackface and using a racial slur in a skit that was itself a parody of Danson's 1993 performance with Goldberg. The rules, it seems, apply differently depending on who you know and which causes you champion publicly.
Danson now says intentions don't matter, only impact does. That's a standard conservatives can respect in the abstract. But it's worth noting that this standard has been applied with extraordinary selectivity. When a conservative figure, a red-state politician, or an anonymous college kid is caught in a decades-old photo, the cultural establishment demands immediate consequences. When a beloved liberal actor does the same thing on a stage in front of hundreds of people, the consequences amount to periodic podcast apologies spread across thirty-plus years.
Danson deserves some credit for not hiding behind lawyers or publicists. He spoke at length. He didn't minimize the act. He dropped the "good intentions" defense. That is more than many public figures manage.
But the episode is a case study in how cultural power works. The people who write the rules on racial sensitivity in America, the entertainment industry, the activist class, the progressive media ecosystem, have never applied those rules evenly. They enforce them downward, against ordinary people and political opponents, while granting indefinite grace periods to members of their own tribe.
Danson said he was "arrogant enough to think that I had something to offer." Fair enough. But the deeper arrogance belongs to a system that decides which blackface incidents end careers and which ones become podcast material.
When the rules only apply to the other side, they aren't rules. They're weapons.
