Outraged by what he had seen and heard, the television host Montel Williams stormed off the dais at the roast. David N. Dinkins, the city’s mayor at the time and the first person of color to hold the office, described the jokes as “way, way over the line.” And the dean of the friars, a fraternal club, apologized.
“That was so arrogant and stupid on my part,” Danson said of his actions.
While discussing the scandal on the podcast, the actor, who is also known for his roles on the CBS television show “Becker” and the movies “Three Men and a Baby” and “Three Men and a Little Lady,” said he and Goldberg had tried to back out of the roast because their extramarital affair was ending. But with hundreds of tickets already having been sold to the celebrity roast, he said, they could not.
“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 he spent months working on his monologue for the roast, which he acknowledged as being flawed from the start.
“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. That will be funny or not, but it’ll, like, be — oh, I have license to.”
