In case you happen to be up late some weeknight and are looking for something to watch, might I suggest Craig Ferguson. If you like the humor around here, he’s like that, only about eight thousand times better.
He’s on after Letterman.
The really great part of the show is that unlike all the other late night shows where they just read off of cue cards, Craig just has an outline of topics and makes stuff up as he goes. And it shows. It’s basically just him rambling by himself (no band, no side kick (okay, he does have a robotic skeleton sidekick, but I don’t know that it really counts) ), and he’s actually funny enough to make it work. Obviously, it’s hit or miss depending on the night since he’s making it up as he goes, but on the whole it’s one of the only things on television that consistently makes me laugh out loud pretty much every time I watch it.
It’s also kind of nice that being on late, it starts off with the best part and slowly tappers from there. He does a little 2-3 minute skit to lead of the show, which is usually pretty good and occasionally involves singing hand puppets (that sort of gives you an idea of the tone of the show). Then there’s the monologue which is hit or miss but also usually pretty good. We then go to the desk for email/twitters/random guest. If it’s email or twitter it’s usually good, if it’s random guest, go to bed. Then we have interview with some kind of sort of celebrity, which is rarely worth staying up for, but occasionally decent.
I not only love his delivery and overall style, as well as making it up as he goes, but I also love that he jumps back and forth between being a show based nearly entirely on poop and fart jokes to making obscure reference to Dali or Kierkegaard. Seriously.
And really, let’s take a quick run through the list of what else is on for late night talk shows:
- There is (or in this case, was) Conan. Vaguely entertaining, but doesn’t really make me laugh, and I have a sort of deep rooted hatred for him stemming from a college roommate I had who watched him every night, loudly, even when I had early classes the next day.
- There’s Letterman. Umm, “Is this anything?” and “Will it float?” are entertaining, but only happen once in a blue moon. Aside from that it was vaguely funny while Conan and Leno were fighting it out, but on the whole it’s mostly just sound to have on, and Paul Shaffer being a continuous public service announcement for why you shouldn’t spend decades doing drugs. (Okay, so Craig apparently did lots of drug for a couple decades too, but has since cleaned up.)
- There’s Jimmy Fallon. And that’s just painful. Have you ever watched it? Did you too think that it must have just been an off night, and tried watching part of it again another night, only to find that it was still terrible? It’s not the it’s offensive, or anything, in fact it would woefully fail the “Is this anything?” test, it’s just that it’s not funny. At all. Except to Jimmy Fallon, who laughs at length after every joke. Unlike the audience. Seriously, it’s like they wanted to do an experiment where a guy just goes out and bombs, every night. I actually watch full episode of it once, hoping, praying that there was some great skit that he always saves for the end. There wasn’t. I went to bed basically feeling bad for the guy that he does that on national TV every night.
- And there’s Leno. Sort of okay in small doses, but I get sick of him in a hurry. It seems like 50% of his comedy is making fun of how dumb other people are, and the other 50% consists of the most hackneyed, formulaic, lowest common denominator humor you can come up with. This is probably wildly off base, but in a really tangential way, it makes me think a proposed reasoning I heard for why many non-slave owning white southern poor resisted the abolition of slavery so strongly in the first half of the 1800′s. It’s wasn’t so much because it was economically beneficial to them, but because it gave a social structure where they were officially better than some one. Admittedly really tangential, but that’s what Leno makes me think of – stupid humor making fun of others for being stupid. For example, the “Headlines” segment – count how many times he calls the people who write them stupid or idiots. The entire “Jay Walking” segment in all of it’s edited down to only the most comically wrong answers glory. Even the monologue, where on a given night he’ll usually preface at least one joke by saying how stupid people are. It’s one of those things I didn’t really notice for a long time, but once I did, I just couldn’t watch him anymore.
- There’s a smattering of others across other networks, but I don’t have cable. So, they could be great, or not, I don’t really know.
So, anyway, Craig Ferguson, telling low brow poop jokes in a way that’s funny and not particularly insulting to others, using running gags while still being fairly random, genuinely opinionated, and pulling about an hour of comedy totally out of his ass, weeknights after Dave.
Robot Skeleton Army, march on.
