Comedian Craig Ferguson spent a decade as host of The Late Late Show on CBS. He left the late-night talk show in 2014 and stepped back into stand-up comedy. The Scotsman's big break came in the mid-1980s at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. His career in the United States took off in earnest in 1996 playing Mr. Wick on The Drew Carey Show.
At age 62, Ferguson now drives his career on his terms. His Pants on Fire stand-up tour stops Saturday at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts, marking his Twin City debut.
“And yet, strangely enough, it’s my favorite city in the United States of America,” Ferguson said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
Boundless optimism is kind of Ferguson’s thing. He opened every monolog on The Late Late Show with, “It’s a great day for America!” He currently hosts a podcast called Joy. And several years ago, he decided to make his stand-up a politics-free zone.
“It was a stylistic choice so I could see if I could do it,” he said. “And I did do it—and it’s something I enjoy doing. I don’t know about you, but even the people I agree with, I’m sick of hearing them. All of the stuff that you’re mad at will still be there when you leave, but the whole idea is that we take a break.”
Ferguson said there’s no turning back—to politics or to late night television.
“I kind of stumbled into it through a series of misadventures,” he said of his Late Late Show gig. “It wasn’t really a career choice for me. I think for me, doing a late-night show was a bit like someone becoming a realtor. Nobody sets out to be a realtor, but it’s a decent job and you get your photograph on a bus stop. So why not?!”
There’s also the phenomenon of lightning not striking twice in the same place. Ferguson carved a niche for himself by veering ever so slightly from the late-night formula. He never had a band, and began without a sidekick (like Ed McMahon, John Melendez Questlove on The Tonight Show, Paul Schaffer on The Late Show, Andy Richter and Fred Armisen on Late Night, Guillermo Rodriguez on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Reggie Watts with Ferguson’s Late Late successor James Corden). Later, one was added—in the form of a mohawked robot voiced by Josh Robert Thompson, who often improvised with Ferguson. Guests ranged from frequent visits by former cast mate Drew Carey to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an interview that won Ferguson a Peabody Award in 2009. Most importantly, Ferguson reads as genuine, unafraid to toss the script or speak candidly about his life. In that regard, post-late-night life isn’t much different.
“I’ve reached the point in my age and my life and my career that I do what I want to do,” said Ferguson. “That’s one of the rare gifts of getting older.”
One of the things he wants to do is tell jokes that aren’t about politics.
“I felt like I could be funnier using the material that was making me laugh,” he said. “I’m not so gifted that I can do stuff that I don’t think is funny. I talk about familial stuff, anecdotal stuff and universal stuff. I don’t know if it gives me a broader audience—it might not.”
Ferguson’s 2017 Netflix special Tickle Fight is a prime example—though Ferguson nearly breaks his cardinal rule in a few jokes alluding to the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
“I did a lot of drugs in Scotland,” he said in the special. “I swear I needed them. Not to escape the violence and sectarian hatred. You get used to that. It’s like living next to the airport—you hardly notice it after a while. No, I needed drugs in Scotland to escape my mother’s sense of interior design.”
Ferguson has been sober for more than three decades.
“It’s kind of an accident of fate, really,” he said. “I thought it was going to make me kind of an automaton. It seems to have, so far, done the opposite. It’s made me more iconoclastic. I feel like I’m more myself.”
Craig Ferguson's Pants on Fire is at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts, 600 N. East St., Bloomington. Tickets are $35-$69 at 309-434-2777 and artsblooming.org.
