ABC REALLY FIRING ON ALL CYLINDERS THIS WEEK: Joy Behar roasted for denying wearing blackface: ‘Enjoy the cancel culture you created.’
Flashback: “Danson’s Racist ‘Humor’ Appalls Crowd at Roast,” the late Roger Ebert wrote in 1993:
It’s a tradition of the celebrity roasts at the Friar’s Club that everything goes — that no joke is in such bad taste that it cannot be told. Friday, that tradition may have ended, as a roast for Whoopi Goldberg turned into such a tasteless display that some audience members hid their faces in their hands, and others left.
They cringed in disbelief during the opening monologue by actor Ted Danson, Whoopi’s lover, who appeared in blackface and used the word “n***er” more than a dozen times during a series of jokes that drew smaller and smaller laughs, until finally the audience was groaning and Danson faltered as he tried to plow through his written material.
At one point he even ate watermelon.
And from the London Telegraph in 2009: Roman Polanski: backlash as Whoopi Goldberg says director didn’t commit ‘rape-rape.’
Not surprisingly, After his appearance on the View today, “Trump Jr. took to Twitter to gush about how much fun he had. ‘I don’t think I’ve enjoyed an interview this much in my life. Guess you could say that I just #Triggered The View!!!’ he wrote.”
At some point in the 1980s, Morton Downey Jr. and Jerry Springer became the prototypes for today’s media culture. Choose the form of your destructor, indeed.