Radio shock-jock Howard Stern has addressed a years-old segment where he’s sporting blackface. The bit first aired back in 1993 as part of his pay-per-view special, New Year’s Rotten Eve Pageant, which showed Stern in blackface uttering the n-word several times. However, it recently resurfaced after Donald Trump, Jr. retweeted an article about it on Friday.
“The s— I did was f—ing crazy. I’ll be the first to admit,” Stern said on his Sirius XM show Monday, via Entertainment Tonight. “I won’t go back and watch those old shows; it’s like, ‘Who is that guy?’ But that was my shtick. That’s what I did, and I own it. I don’t think I got embraced by Nazi groups and hate groups. They seemed to think I was against them, too. Everybody had a bone to pick with me.”
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“It was something in me, a drive you wouldn’t believe,” Stern continued. “As a young man, I wanted to succeed on the radio, and I wanted to go f—ing crazy. Emotionally it was costing me a lot. The FCC was after me; the right-wing was after me; I had the Ku Klux Klan after me, threatening my life. All kinds of crazy stories.”
The segment itself was lampooning Ted Danson, who had appeared in blackface at an event alongside his then-girlfriend, Whoopi Goldberg. While the radio host admitted he’d make fun of the situation were it to happen today, he’d take a more measured approach. “If I had to do it all over again, would I lampoon Ted Danson, a white guy in blackface? Yeah, I was lampooning him and saying, ‘I’m going to shine a light on this.’ But would I go about it the same way now? Probably not. Not probably, I wouldn’t.”
While Stern admits that he and his sense of humor have evolved dramatically over the years, the noted Trump critic also spoke frankly about the president’s son, as well as his father, criticizing them over the fact that they “won’t go into psychotherapy and change” themselves. “Why not change the way you’re approaching things because wearing a mask is not a bad thing,” he continued. “Telling people the actual size of the crowd at your inauguration is OK. Attacking me during the coronavirus and Black Lives Matter is absolutely f—ing crazy, concentrating on me. You want to concentrate on me and bully me, and expose me, with all the TV shows I’ve done? They’re all out there. There’s nothing new here. We all know.”
