Monday, August 17, 2026

Blackface in History and Contemporary Comedy


by Alvin Blackshear  |  Historian & Researcher  <ablackshear@gmail.com>

Racism in American entertainment rarely announces itself as a single, settled question. It shows up instead as a set of overlapping stories, each one complicating the last. The history of blackface, and its strange half-life in comedy today, is one of the clearest examples of that complexity.

Ted Danson, 1993

On October 8, 1993, Ted Danson appeared at a New York Friars Club roast honoring Whoopi Goldberg, with whom he was then romantically involved. He performed in blackface makeup with exaggerated white lips and repeatedly used a racial slur during a set built around jokes about their relationship. Contemporary reporting from the event describes Danson wearing blackface makeup and large white lips while using the slur several times and joking about his sex life with Goldberg.

The response was immediate and sharply divided. Then-Mayor David Dinkins and other attendees objected to the material, and Montel Williams walked out and resigned from the club, writing in his resignation telegram that he had been confused about whether he was at a Friars event or a rally for the Klan and Aryan Nation. Goldberg, by contrast, defended Danson publicly, telling reporters that the two of them had written the material together and were not trying to be politically correct but to be funny for themselves.

That defense is the complicating detail people tend to forget. It was not simply a white performer testing a racist trope. It was a Black performer with a personal stake in the material and, according to her own account, a hand in creating it. The moral clarity of "blackface is bad" runs into real friction when the collaborator defending it is the person the routine was ostensibly honoring.

More than three decades later, Danson revisited the incident himself. In June 2026, he told podcast host W. Kamau Bell that he intended to keep apologizing for the rest of his life, and rejected the idea that his intentions at the time should count for much, saying the impact on people is what matters, not the intent behind it. He also described how the footage resurfaced during the Black Lives Matter movement and cost him work, and credited conversations facilitated by Jane Fonda and author Heather McGhee with helping him understand what he had done. That a public figure would spend over thirty years working through, rather than simply outliving, an old controversy suggests these reckonings are rarely as fast or as final as news cycles imply.

The Kake Walk at the University of Vermont

A very different kind of blackface tradition took shape at the University of Vermont beginning in the early 1890s. The Kake Walk grew out of the American cakewalk and minstrel traditions and eventually became a formal fraternity competition, with pairs of male students performing exaggerated high-stepping dances to a tune called Cotton Babes, often alongside minstrel-style skits. By the mid-twentieth century it had become the centerpiece of UVM's Winter Carnival, drawing crowds that reportedly reached around eight thousand students, alumni, and local residents at its peak in the Patrick Gym.

The instructive part of this history is that opposition did not begin in the 1960s, as is often assumed. Historians James Loewen and Larry McCrorey traced organized dissent back to 1954, when the fraternity Phi Sigma Delta refused to perform in blackface, a decision that drew criticism from the wider campus community. Objections continued to appear in the student newspaper and local press for years afterward.

The university's actual path away from the tradition was gradual and, in retrospect, uncomfortable in its own right. In 1963 the Interfraternity Council voted to replace blackface with light green makeup while keeping the exaggerated dialect intact. After audience complaints that the green was not dark enough, the makeup was changed to a darker green in 1964, a color UVM's own archival materials note is often indistinguishable from blackface in black-and-white photographs. The Kake Walk was not formally eliminated until 1969, following decisions by a student-faculty committee, the Student Association, and the Interfraternity Council, over the strong objections of alumni who considered it a cherished tradition.

There is a further layer worth preserving rather than flattening. The cakewalk itself originated among enslaved African Americans, and was later appropriated by white minstrelsy and used to reinforce racial hierarchy after Reconstruction. UVM's Kake Walk was a specific collegiate distortion of that longer, more complicated Black history, not a synonym for it. Collapsing the two stories loses something real about how appropriation works.

Black comedians and the same imagery, used differently

Blackface's afterlife in comedy has also been shaped by Black performers testing its logic rather than repeating it. Dave Chappelle has used blackface repeatedly as a reference point for thinking about where representation becomes harmful. In his 2021 Netflix special The Closer, he compared identifying as transgender to the act of wearing blackface, a comparison that became one focus of the criticism and employee walkout that followed the special's release. Netflix employees organized a walkout at the company's Los Angeles offices, and executives, including co-CEO Ted Sarandos, later acknowledged mishandling their initial response to staff concerns.

Chappelle's discomfort with his own earlier work followed a related logic. He has described growing uneasy with the racial humor on Chappelle's Show not because of what he intended a sketch to mean, but because he could not control whether audiences were laughing at racism or simply enjoying the stereotype itself.

Key and Peele approached the same territory from the opposite direction. In the 2012 sketch "Das Negros," the pair play two Black men in Nazi-occupied Germany who disguise themselves in whiteface to evade a Nazi officer searching for Black people, a premise built entirely around exaggerating how visibly the disguise fails. The sketch uses racial makeup as a tool of satire aimed outward at the absurdity of racial policing, rather than as a costume worn for its own sake.

What these cases share

Taken together, these episodes resist a single tidy lesson. A white actor's blackface routine was defended, in the moment, by the Black woman it was framed around. A university's opposition to a blackface tradition predates the era most people associate with civil rights activism, and its actual abolition took the form of a compromise, green makeup, that was arguably almost as troubling as what it replaced. And Black comedians today are still testing, from different directions, whether racial imagery can be turned into a critique of racism rather than a restatement of it. The common thread is not a rule but a question that keeps resurfacing: whether an audience is laughing at the target of a joke or at the harm the joke depicts, and how much control a performer actually has over which one happens.

References

Ted Danson and the 1993 Friars Club roast

The Kake Walk at the University of Vermont

Dave Chappelle, The Closer, and the Netflix walkout

Key & Peele, "Das Negros"

Suggestions for Further Reading and Research

For readers who want to go deeper than a single article can, a few directions are worth pursuing:

On the history and mechanics of blackface minstrelsy. Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class remains a standard scholarly starting point for understanding how minstrelsy functioned as both racist spectacle and, paradoxically, a form of cross-racial cultural exchange. Spike Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled is a useful fictional companion piece, dramatizing many of the same tensions around audience reception that appear in the Chappelle discussion above.

On the Kake Walk specifically. The essay collection Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment (Liveright) includes a chapter, "Sugarcoating Slavery: How the University of Vermont's Kake Walk Made Blackface a Collegiate Sport," that goes well beyond what a short article can cover. UVM's own digital collections are unusually rich for a case study like this, including alumni correspondence objecting to the tradition's end, which is worth reading directly rather than through summary.

On the cakewalk's origins before appropriation. Because this article treats the Kake Walk and the original cakewalk as related but distinct, readers interested in the earlier, African American history of the cakewalk itself may want to look into its documented origins on plantations in the antebellum South and its subsequent life in Black vaudeville, which is a separate and much larger story than the UVM adaptation.

On satire, intent, and audience reception in comedy. The recurring question in this article, whether a joke critiques a stereotype or simply reproduces it for an audience that enjoys the stereotype, is a long-running debate in comedy criticism. Readers might compare how this question has been raised around other satirists who use identity-based material, including Norman Lear's All in the Family and its handling of Archie Bunker's bigotry, as an earlier television-era version of the same argument.

On contemporary accountability and apology. Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, cited by Danson himself as influential in his own reflection, offers a broader economic and social argument about the costs of racism that extends well past entertainment and into policy.

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