Whoopi Goldberg has always been after the laughs.
Indeed, the comedian (real name Caryn Johnson) recently shared that her original stage name stemmed from a popular gag gift.
“Whoopi first, and I was whoopie cushion,” she divulged to Seth Meyers on the July 11 episode of Late Night. “And then I was Whoopi Cushión.”
After coming up with the name in her 30s, The View cohost noted, it was her mother Emma Harris who convinced her to change “Cushion” to “Goldberg.”
“She said, ‘You are diminishing your abilities,’” Whoopi recalled. “‘If you call yourself by Whoopi Cushion, people are not really going to appreciate what you can do.’ And I said, ‘Oh really? Oh, great namer of the star?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’”
As for where her mother got the name Goldberg? “She said, ‘Well, there’s a lot of family names, we’ve got a lot of different people in our family, I like Goldberg,’” Whoopi explained. “And I said, ‘Okay well we’ll try it.’ Well?”