The Late Late Show host Craig Ferguson’s poignant 2007 monologue defending Britney Spears is considered his best. But now, the former CBS host revealed that he thought it would cost him his show.
“What surprises me about that monologue is that I thought I would get fired,” Ferguson, 64, the current host of CNN’s American On Purpose, told Obsessed: The Podcast, adding, “But I didn’t care.”
“I thought I’d get fired because it was still fairly early in the show. I was only a couple of years in, and I thought the show wasn’t as big—my late-night show is much bigger now than it was when I was doing it,” he continued. “And when I did that, I thought, ‘They’re gonna s--t-can—they’ll never renew my contract after this.’ But I thought, ‘F--- it, I just don’t wanna do this anymore. I don’t wanna do it this way.’ And I didn’t.”
While seemingly every other late-night show relentlessly targeted then-25-year-old Spears, who had notoriously shaved her head upon leaving a rehab facility after just one day, Ferguson refused to make any jokes about the pop star in his candid monologue.
Instead, he argued that comedy should punch up, rather than kick someone while they’re down.
“Comedy should have a certain amount of joy in it,” he said to the audience. “It should be about attacking the powerful: the politicians, the Trumps, the blowhards. We shouldn’t be attacking the vulnerable.”
The prescient jab at Donald Trump—who at the time was just a celebrity media personality—was nothing more than coincidence, according to Ferguson.
“He was someone who was in a position of power, who could handle that kind of attack,” the Scottish-American comedian said on the podcast. “I was using him as an example of someone who was powerful, as opposed to Brittany, who was clearly someone who was powerless at the time, and obviously the distinction between the two.”
“So I don’t think it was a particularly an attack on Trump,” he added. “What it was was using him as an example.”
Ferguson remembers having a “very strong feeling” about watching Spears hit rock bottom. The megastar’s weekend bender had coincided with his own 15-year sobriety anniversary.
“When I came in to work that morning, the writers—doing their jobs correctly—had a bunch of jokes written about it,” he recalled. “And as I began my tirade of how awful that was in the writers’ room, I saw a lot of writers quietly move their pads underneath the table to put the jokes away.”
Still, Ferguson maintains that it wasn’t any kind of “manifesto.”
“I’m not saying you can’t make jokes about this. You can make jokes about anything you want,” he said. “It just didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t make sense to me then. It doesn’t now.”
The late-night host said that there can often be a “great feeling” in comedy about joining in on what the collective is saying.
“It seems to me like the media is like f---ing watching toddlers playing soccer. They have no idea of strategy. They just all run towards the ball,” he explained. “And I feel like I didn’t want to just run blindly after every subject, every joke, everything.”
“Weirdly enough, I think that monologue started pushing us into the direction that the show became autonomous,” he concluded. ”When it became not really a late-night show, but something else entirely."
Ferguson’s new show, American On Purpose, airs Saturday nights on CNN.
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