Thanks for this link. The author should've included it. I remember when Carol Burnett successfully sued the national Inquirer for making up a story about a similar drunken rant, so I was somewhat skeptical about this story. But this link has removed any doubt about that for me.

I am still inclined to forgive Clapton for the reasons I gave above, and because it happened so long ago. Judging from your picture, you probably weren’t even alive when this incident took place, so you probably wouldn’t know that comedy was a lot edgier back then. This would still have been pretty awful in 1976, because Clapton had no talent as a comedian, and even less comic talent when he was drunk. But the Monty Pythons used blackface and yellowface in many of their routines, the assumption being that in our enlightening times, this was ridiculing racism, not racism itself. This was arguably a mistake, but the question is complicated I think. I talk about this more here.

https://teedrockwell.medium.com/the-fall-and-rise-of-forbidden-language-bb0a27152b09