The Catalyst interview: Craig Ferguson

Late night talk show TV never saw Craig Ferguson coming. America might’ve though it had been primed for wacky shenanigans, tart sarcasm, out-there monologues and shameless flirting with female celebrities by years of David Letterman and his antics, but Ferguson turned that amplifier up to 11 when he hosted CBS’ The Late Late Show from 2005 through 2014.

He has in his possession something no other Scottish comedian can claim: A Peabody Award, given him for a (very serious) 2009 interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Other than that, it’s been (mostly) all fun and highland games.

The Glasgow-born Ferguson left the chat show of his own volition (more on that in this interview), was replaced by the safe-as-milk James Corden, and has spent the intervening years doing standup comedy and the occasional Netflix special.

He has a show in Ferguson Hall (there you go!), Thursday evening inside the Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa. Tickets are available here.

St. Pete Catalyst: I made a list of the funniest Scottish people I could think of … to me, if you do standup in Edinburgh, everybody’s drunk and throws stuff at you. Or am I completely wrong?

Craig Ferguson: It depends on the time of day you’re doing it. When I was starting out, when I was 24, my show began at one o’clock in the morning. They were throwing stuff at the stage before I got to the stage. You had to get your way through the stuff to get on. But if you go earlier, the more kind of civilized it becomes. The more touristy it becomes. I suppose that’s probably where I first met American audiences, the Edinburgh Festival.

When you’re a Scottish standup comic, it is a goal to get to America and play for that audience?

It was for me, because my family has such ties in America. My father’s brother, my Uncle James, moved to America in the early 1960s, before I was born. So I grew up with the legend of my Uncle James and his family living in Long Island, this magical land where everything was great.

I went to America for the first time, to visit my Uncle James and his family with my dad when I was 13. And I think from that moment on, when I tasted my first root beer and went to my first bowling alley, I thought ‘this really is a magical place.’ Where everything is great.

Our first exposure to you in the States was as an actor on The Drew Carey Show. Why was that – because you couldn’t get arrested as a comic? Or was it the plan all along, to be an actor first?

I supposed it happened at the same time. I’d been doing them (both) in Scotland, and they’re kind of the same job. If you’re a standup and someone says ‘You want to act in this?’ you don’t go no, I’m sorry, it would compromise my art. It’s like ‘Yeah! How much?’

When I hear posh English actors say ‘Well, I didn’t know at that point if the part was correct for me,’ really I didn’t have that luxury. It’s a job! If it came with a paycheck, I was in.

The Drew Carey Show was a great gig for me. And Drew and I are still friends, all these years later. Because Drew was a standup, I think that’s really how we hit if off, personally. He’s from Cleveland – and if Glasgow in Scotland was a city in America, it would be Cleveland, Ohio. We became very friendly because we just had a lot in common. And I think that helped my experience there as well.

As a standup, is there a moment, after you’ve been on the stage for a while, when you know you’ve got ‘em? They’ll laugh at anything you say.

I think the longer you’re doing it, the closer to you hitting the stage, you try and make that moment happen. Now, when I go out, they know who I am, and we know why we’re there, and we’re going to get on with it. At the beginning, as I said, these early shows, it was trial by fire.

I think it’s kinda going away now, that live trial by fire thing. I think a lot of young comics now start out recording their stuff on YouTube. I’d be doing that if I was starting out as well; I don’t know if it’s better or worse, but it’s different. I’m kind of glad I didn’t do it that way, because everything that you do exists forever. And you know a lot of my early shows, I’m really hoping they don’t surface on the internet.

Speaking of YouTube, I just saw your “I’ve been sober 15 years” monologue from 2007, where you talked about not saying sarcastic jokey things about celebrities who were obviously having personal issues. You told the audience you felt bad about making those jokes, since you had been in a bad place too. Britney Spears was your example. Do you still feel that way?

That was 15 years ago now. What that moment was, for me, was a change in direction. I’d been doing late night for a couple of years. I had a bunch of writers who were all who they were, decent writers but they weren’t me writing for myself. They were writing jokes they thought the audience wanted. What the producers thought the audience wanted.

The bad thing about ‘Well, what joke do I do?’ is that you end up doing the joke that people want you to do. If you’re an actor, you say the words, that’s the job. But I think if you’re a comic, and the job is that, then you kind of have to say your own words. Or you’ll go crazy.

And I think that was ‘I don’t want to do it this way. If I’m going to say something mean, I want to be able to back it up because I mean it.’ If I sound snarky about someone, it’s because I genuinely feel that way about them. And if I don’t feel that way about them, then I don’t want to say it.

And a lot of the targets I’d had up until that point on late night, I hadn’t even heard of these people. And I was saying things about them. And look, I’m not perfect – you do five shows a week, we did 250 shows a year when I was in late night … jokes get through and you go ‘I wish I hadn’t said that,’ but it is what it is.

Nowadays, I only do live shows, and I’ve thrown out the stuff that makes me uncomfortable by the time I record it. In late night, you often didn’t have that luxury, it was so fast.

What that a factor in your leaving the show after nine years?

A hundred percent, absolutely. I couldn’t take the machinery of it. When I was a kid, when I was a punk rocker, I used to say ‘You’ll never get me in a suit and sittin’ behind a desk.’

And they did it. They got me doing it.

Ah, but the money was good, right?

Oh, the money was great. But the thing about fuck-you money is that it can fuck you. That’s what I found. At a certain point you go ‘Is it always about the money?’ And the answer is, it’s very difficult because … but there’s gotta be something else there as well.

The truth is, I go out and do standup now … I don’t need to do it, I like to do it. I want to do it. And most nights – well, not every night – it feels like such a privilege to go out and do this show. Most nights it’s like yeah, I love to do it.