Originally appeared on E! Online
Whoopi Goldberg has always been after the laughs.
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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.”
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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,’” Goldberg 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.’”
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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,’” Goldberg explained. “And I said, ‘Okay well we’ll try it.’ Well?”
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Naturally, Goldberg’s mother — who died in 2010 — wasn’t going to let her daughter take her name idea for free. And the 68-year-old explained everything her mother asked for in return is spelled out in her new book Bits and Pieces.
“She said, ‘I only want three things,’” Goldberg added. “She said she wanted an English beaver bowler hat. It had to come in the box—the leather box — with the brush. She wanted an Ermine coat. And she wanted a Bugatti. When you read the book, you’ll understand, my mother had very good taste.”
While the Sister Act star never fulfilled her mother’s wish of a Bugatti — because she couldn’t drive — she did fulfill the requests of the hat and coat.
“If you get an opportunity there’s a photograph of my mother and my daughter, and my daughter had just had her daughter, and she’s wearing her beaver bowler hat,” Goldberg noted. “The Ermine coat, she never wanted to wear outside, she just wanted to be able to take it and drag it down the stairs like an old movie star.”
