On December 15, 2009, late-night TV viewers looking to give The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson a whirl for the very first time were greeted with an immediate demonstration of this show’s style of humor. In the very first shot of this cold open, we see, in the background, a man in bondage gear clutching a red guitar and kneeling on top of Ferguson’s desk. In the foreground, a shark puppet and a crocodile puppet wearing a cowboy puppet look around before the instantly recognizable opening beats of the Trace Adkins tune “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” begin to play. With that, the pair of puppets begin lip-syncing along to the song while, 12 seconds into this cold opening, a trio of scantily-clad women emerge from behind that desk and some nearby chairs to start dancing.
This segment is entirely captured in a single take, a subtle visual detail that accentuates the humor and bizarreness of everything. It’s like you stumbled onto a soundstage and are now watching this performance unfold in real-time. As this sequence concludes with the crocodile puppet mouthing the closing spoken words of this tune (“That’s why we do what we do…it ain’t for the money, it ain’t for the glory, it ain’t for the free whiskey…it’s for the badonkadonk”) while the trio of women coo over both puppets, the 1000th episode of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson has epitomized its style of humor. It’s weird. It’s full of puppets and animals. It’s hard to decipher any underlying point. Most importantly, it’s hilarious.
How Craig Ferguson Dismantled the Norms of Late-Night
The landscape of late-night television has always been about pleasing the audience. These programs come on at the end of the day — they’re meant to be gentle, relaxing, and told through a reliable structure that can give viewers something steady they can look forward to after the chaos of a weekday. The mold of these programs was influenced by Johnny Carson‘s run on The Tonight Show, with writer Dick Cavett describing Carson’s approach to this program as “[making] it as amusing and reliable as possible — a late-night, breezy show that doesn’t disturb anybody.” Carson was a comic genius and flourished in that format, but many other late-night hosts created tedium by being so rigid and formulaic.
Craig Ferguson took on the mantle of The Late Late Show for CBS at the start of 2005. Running right after David Letterman’s program on the network, Ferguson could’ve just phoned in a half-hearted rehash of Letterman’s style of comedy or the antics of any other late-night host. But he didn’t. He went in a much more unorthodox direction. In the book The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy, author Bill Carter theorizes that Ferguson growing up in Scotland informed this creative spirit. A bit detached from Carson’s inescapable influence on American TV comedy, Ferguson didn’t spend years idolizing the man and wanting to mimic his Tonight Show routine. When he got the chance to anchor something in late night, he was inevitably going to be looking at his creative instincts rather than wondering what Carson would do.
It didn’t hurt that The Late Late Show was not an institution crammed full of iconic hosts and moments that Ferguson was being expected to imitate. Though Tom Snyder and Craig Kilborn both hosted The Late Late Show for multiple years, neither one cultivated the fanbase or comic influence of Conan O’Brien or David Letterman, let alone Johnny Carson. When Ferguson started hosting this program, he wasn’t expected to suddenly become a clone of Snyder or Kilborn; he had a little more room to experiment. Plus, he was going on at a much later time slot than Letterman or Jay Leno. This meant his potential audience would be limited…but also that he’d have a bit more freedom to be niche. With that freedom, Ferguson created something unforgettable.
Why Was Craig Ferguson So Funny?
There are several immediately apparent qualities in Craig Ferguson’s tenure behind the desk at The Late Late Show that make him stand out from other late-night hosts. For one thing, there are puppets. Ferguson always had fun with puppets on his show, which initially consisted of a gaggle of various animal puppets he’d get into weird shenanigans with before those critters were eschewed in favor of Ferguson’s robot skeleton sidekick, Geoff Peterson (Josh Robert Thompson). Though much more elaborate than a basic bunny or snail puppet, Peterson was still an animatronic figure that demonstrated how many laughs Ferguson’s show could wring out of puppets. Other late-night programs concerned themselves with getting as many flesh-and-blood celebrities as possible. Ferguson, meanwhile, cracked people up with creations made of felt and metal.
Then there was the easygoing improvisational nature of the show, which was established early on in Ferguson’s run. The meticulous scripting of Jay Leno’s Tonight Show tenure was absent from Ferguson’s Late Late Show world, as seen by him shredding note cards with topic suggestions before his celebrity interviews. There was a free-flowing nature to everything from Ferguson’s monologue to his interaction with Peterson (which wrung comic gold out of the two coming up with ludicrous gags on the fly) to the intimate conversations Ferguson would have with famous guest stars. Other late-night shows reek of artifice whenever the hosts have to act chipper about every word their guest says, it all feels phony and calculated.
But Ferguson’s 26 interactions with Kristen Bell, just as one example, radiated genuine friendship, with their exchanges going in way more interesting directions than usual late-night chit-chat. While Ferguson bucked late-night traditions with his opening monologue to give himself more freedom as a comic, eschewing normal protocol for celebrity interviews allowed his guest segments to take on a more distinctive and even intimate ambiance. His chit-chats could sometimes feel like just two pals conversing rather than a movie star coming on a CBS program to hawk a new movie. Such engaging talks wouldn’t have been possible if Ferguson was so rigidly beholden to a script.
Plus, the improvisational nature of the show led to an unpredictable quality to The Late Late Show’s comedy that’s just hysterical. In later seasons, a segment dedicated to reading tweets and e-mails from the viewers would often just devolve into nonsensical celebrity impressions and non-sequiturs exchanged between Ferguson and Peterson. You never knew just what each of these men were going to say next, though there was a good chance the unexpected comedic mayhem would leave Ferguson in a fit of laughter. The whole show was like that, delightfully ramshackle and always moving towards the unexpected. No wonder random clips of the program still work like gangbusters years after they first aired on TV. Improvisational comedy from characters like Sid the Cussing Bunny Rabbit will always be funny — there’s a timelessness to all the randomness.
On top of all that, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson felt extra funny and even occasionally dangerous because of the network it was airing on. Ferguson was not doing all this comedy at 4:23 AM on Adult Swim or in the deepest corners of an obscure YouTube channel. He was a late-night program blasted out on the airwaves by the same network that aired The Big Bang Theory, NCIS, and We Are Men. Not all of CBS’s programming was dismal, but nearly all of it, at least during the era Ferguson was on the air, reinforced the status quo and wasn’t looking to challenge viewers. By contrast, here was Ferguson, a man who challenged both the form of late-night programming and the censors with his barrage of naughty words. His shtick would’ve been funny under any circumstances, but it was especially humorous and exciting to see this type of creativity flourish in CBS of all places.
Craig Ferguson’s Lasting Legacy
In the middle of January 2023, news broke that, nearly a decade after his time on The Late Late Show came to an end, Craig Ferguson was looking to stage a late-night comeback. Specifically, Ferguson was aiming to headline a new syndicated late-night program that would run half an hour, while comments from Ferguson indicate that puppets will factor into it to some degree. It’s great that Ferguson will be back on the airwaves soon, though it’s hard to imagine anything being able to recapture the magic of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. That’s no slam on the talents of modern-day Ferguson, just a reflection on how hard it is for any artist to come home again.
Still, it’ll be a welcome sight to see Ferguson try his hand at this kind of comedic lunacy again given the current state of late-night television. This domain of small-screen entertainment is currently dominated by awkward stabs by streamers to get in on this market, too many people trying to just mimic Jon Stewart, and, of course, whatever Jimmy Fallon is doing (thank goodness we still have John Oliver). With so many late-night hosts seemingly content to just ride the wave of what’s worked in the past, even a stab at some vintage Craig Ferguson unpredictability would be welcome.
Plus, even if the new Ferguson show doesn’t work, we’ll all still have The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson to marvel over. The exciting uncertainty, witty banter, and plain sense of fun that underpinned this show made it such a joy to watch and an incredibly unique creature in the pantheon of late-night programming. Ferguson really did change the game of what late-night hosts could look like, shifting the image of these entertainers from someone who rigidly follows a routine to somebody who could unleash a dancing horse at the drop of a hat. From giving Larry King one of his funniest moments on television to forever changing the way anyone will hear the words “Daffy Duck” , The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson left a hysterical and wonderful legacy. If nothing else, the commitment and madness contained within that “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” cold open alone must justify the entire existence of the show.