WARNING: This story contains explicit language.
Howard Stern has addressed a resurfaced video that shows him in blackface and using the N-word multiple times.
The video, from a New Year’s Eve special in 1993, was resurfaced by Donald Trump Jr., who retweeted the clip, originally posted by filmmaker Tariq Nasheed.
“Yikes!” Trump Jr. tweeted on June 12. “NSFW: Howard Stern says N-word too many times during awful blackface impression that should have Libs yelling ‘CANCEL!'”
Stern addressed the skit on Monday, which features the late Sherman Hemsley and shows Stern in blackface pretending to be Ted Danson, who was dating Whoopi Goldberg at the time.
“The s–t I did was f–king crazy. I’ll be the first to admit,” Stern said on his SiriusXM radio show.
“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,” he said. “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.
“It was something in me, a drive you wouldn’t believe. As a young man, I wanted to succeed on the radio and I wanted to go f–king crazy,” the 66-year-old radio host said. “Emotionally, it was costing me a lot. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) 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.”
Stern revealed he was “fined millions of dollars” by the government “for sex” and “not for race.”
“I was fined millions of dollars by the federal government, for sex. Not for race, because if you talked about race, they never cared,” Stern recalled.
“Look, that was the show. I went into therapy and said, ‘What is this? Do I always have to be the guy pulling my pants down? Can I find a way to do the show where I can be a lot happier?’ Over the years, I did change the show. A lot of people who did like that humour, where I was completely pulling my pants off, those people are pissed off at me now. They think I’m a sellout and I’m not doing a good show anymore. I got soft.”
Stern said he realized he “can’t be insane completely 24 hours a day” if he was going to have a successful marriage and family.
“I have to figure out a better way to communicate. So I evolved and changed,” he said.
The radio host said that he wouldn’t make the same mistakes again.
“I was able to change my approach, able to change my life and change how I communicated,” Stern said. “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.
“At the same point, I will say, it f–king distresses me that Donald Trump Jr. and Donald (Trump) themselves won’t go into psychotherapy and change,” he said. “Why not change the way you’re approaching things because wearing a mask is not a bad thing. Telling people the actual size of the crowd at your inauguration is OK.”
Stern continued: “Attacking me during the coronavirus and Black Lives Matter is absolutely f–king 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. I was the craziest motherf–ker on radio. There will never be another show crazier than mine. There will never be another show, ever, that was as f–king wacky as my show.”
Stern called out U.S. President Donald Trump and said: “If you solve the pandemic, then we can go and review all my old shows.”
“Am I a bad guy? I don’t think so,” he added. “Donald Trump didn’t think so. He was on my show 27 times.”
Stern and Trump Jr. have been going back and forth at each other since the coronavirus pandemic began.
In May, Stern referred to Trump as a celebrity wannabe who secretly hates his followers, and Stern sarcastically responded to Trump Jr.’s criticism of him for his comments.
“I can’t argue with him; that kid is such a success,” Stern said of Trump Jr. “He is such a wit, he is such a genius. He would have made a fortune if he wasn’t under his father’s thumb. Game over. You can’t argue with a genius like that.”
Trump Jr. compared Stern to Hillary Clinton while on SiriusXM’s Jim and Sam Show, where he referenced Clinton calling his dad’s followers “deplorables.”
“It’s sort of disappointing,” Trump Jr. said of Stern. “I mean, I would think at least the sort of original Howard, I imagine most of those blue-collar people that he now hates since he became Hollywood Howard would’ve probably been pretty big Trump supporters.”
He continued: “He’s acting like Hillary. What probably cost her some of the election was calling half the country ‘deplorables’ for wanting to support someone who was going to get things done for them.”
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