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It’ll be three years this coming January since CBS took a chance on a Scottish character actor named Craig Ferguson — best known for playing Drew Carey’s boss on The Drew Carey Show — as host of the Late Late Show.
There were some naysayers, he admits, “but a couple of million viewers a night is pretty good. We are up against Conan (O’Brien) and Jimmy (Kimmel) and we’re usually a little behind Conan and a little ahead of Jimmy.”
Ferguson, who hosts Saturday’s Just For Laughs Toronto closing gala at Massey Hall, credits the show with reviving his dormant standup comedy career.
“I actually hadn’t done standup in 10 years,” says Ferguson, who once performed in Montreal under the stage name Bing Hitler. “I’d been acting and doing movies and television, and I’d been writing. And when I started doing the show, I realized the monologue is basically 10 minutes of new standup every night. So, I went back into doing clubs and in the past three or four months I’ve started doing theatres every other weekend, rather than doing the clubs.
“The clubs are like two or three shows a night and people are enjoying their brisket, that’s strange work.”
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When I point out that Jay Leno tries out new material every Sunday (at a club in Hermosa Beach, Calif., last time we checked), Ferguson says. “Yeah, that is a smart thing to do it every week. But I happen to be a parent. Jay just has a bunch of cars.”
As for acting, Ferguson says he has no regrets. The role that turned him off for good, he says, was the Person Of Indeterminate Gender in the Jim Carrey film Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events.
“That was a lot of hanging about in a dress. And at that point I realized I didn’t want to do that kind of thing anymore, sitting around, two and a half hours in makeup to be on screen for 30 seconds. I’m really not built for this.
CAREY-ING ON: Meanwhile, Late Late Show viewers know that Ferguson has had a cheeky thing going on with Bob Barker, whose old show The Price Is Right tapes in the same building. “I’ll definitely miss him,” Ferguson says of Barker’s retirement.
“But the good news is Drew Carey is his replacement. He’s on the show Monday to talk about it, and obviously we go back a long way. Drew is perfect, he’s a real game player. He has Risk nights at his house, and I’ve played. I’ve learned never to try and take Europe and Asia at the same time.”
PUNCHLINE-DRUNK LOVE: Some more of our favourite lines from the first-ever Just For Laughs Toronto festival:
• “Yeah, it was sad. But you knew it was only a matter of time. Face it, that’s why we watched the show.” — Alonzo Bodden on the death of the Crocodile Hunter.
• “You! With the water bottle! You are not getting on that plane!... Tuberculosis? Come right in, have a nice flight.” — Bodden..
• “We’ve been 40 miles from Italy the whole time and you didn’t tell me? Start the f---ing car! I’ll kill you later!” — John Pinette, who hates French food and loves Italian. He’d been shooting a movie in the South of France when a crew member suggested they do a short drive to Italy for dinner.
• “It’s not good like ‘I think I’ll have another scoop.’ It’s good like ‘I think I’ll sell all my stuff and move here and eat gelato.’” — Pinette, on how much he loves gelato.
• “You know when you’ve had too much to drink? When you wake up and your wife says, ‘Get in the house!’” — John Mendoza.
• “I was going to say, ‘You do this to everyone, right?’ But I decided that would come off jealous.” — Howie Mandel on the old-fashioned prostate exam that comes with your checkup.
• And our choice for worst line: “A pedophile alarm has gone off across Britain. What about a pedophile alarm clock? It goes off when the big hand is on the little hand.” — U.K. comic Frank Skinner. Between Montreal and here, I’ve heard him do that line three times now, and it only ever gets groans and boos.
BEST CONFESSION: Gala host Howie Mandel admitted (with vocal demonstration) that he can only do one cartoon voice, and his voiceovers as Bobby in Bobby’s World, Skeeter in Muppet Babies and Gizmo in both Gremlins movies were all exactly the same.
Speaking of Howie, it turned into a great plug for Toronto when Jay Leno did a live feed from Mandel’s Massey Hall gala Thursday night. Included was a hidden-camera bit Mandel had recorded at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, in which he posed as a concierge and punked tourists — convincing one American that Canadian money was called “Pounds Eh” and that 20 of them would get you eight bucks American.
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca