Whoopi Goldberg was born Caryn Elaine Johnson, and by her own account the surname that made her famous was her mother’s idea. Before Emma Johnson stepped in, the woman who would go on to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony was planning to perform as Whoopi Cushion.
She told the story on Late Night with Seth Meyers in July 2024 while promoting her memoir Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me. “Caryn Johnson wasn’t it,” she wrote of her birth name in that book, explaining that she wanted something more interesting once she began landing parts in plays.
The joke came first
“Whoopi” began as a backstage joke with staying power. She has said colleagues compared her to a whoopee cushion because of what happens to a performer who never gets a moment alone in a bathroom. For a while she leaned into the gag, adding a French-sounding flourish to the surname.
Her mother was not amused. “You are diminishing your abilities,” Goldberg recalled her saying on the show. Emma then offered an alternative drawn, she claimed, from the family’s many branches, closing the matter with three words: “I like Goldberg.”
The price of the suggestion, Goldberg said, was a list of three luxury items: an English beaver bowler hat in its leather box, an ermine coat and a Bugatti. Her mother got the hat and the coat. The Bugatti never materialized.
Where the Goldberg story gets complicated
Goldberg has not always told it the same way. In 2011 she said flatly that “Goldberg is my name,” describing it as part of her family and heritage, and she has said she considers herself Jewish. Her family, she has said, is “Jewish, Buddhist, Baptist, and Catholic.”
Genealogy points somewhere else. Researcher Henry Louis Gates Jr. traced her ancestors for a 2006 PBS documentary and found no known Jewish ancestry and no relative named Goldberg. The same work identified part of her heritage among the Papel and Bayote people of present-day Guinea-Bissau, and traced great-great-grandparents who became landowners in northern Florida in 1873.
The two accounts are not as far apart as they look. In one she says Goldberg is a family name; in the other, her mother picked it from the family’s own stock of names. A genealogy and a family’s story answer different questions.
A career under the name
- November 13, 1955: Caryn Elaine Johnson is born in Manhattan
- 1983: Creates The Spook Show, a one-woman set of character monologues
- October 24, 1984: The show opens on Broadway, retitled Whoopi Goldberg
- 1985: Stars in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple
- 1991: Wins the Oscar for Ghost
- 2002: Completes the EGOT, the first Black woman to do so
- May 7, 2024: Publishes Bits and Pieces
Her Broadway debut was billed under the invented name, and that show’s recording won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album under the same billing.
Goldberg turns 71 this Friday, November 13.
Further reading
Image: Library of Congress Life, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
