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Craig Ferguson's American on Purpose Laughs Through Awful Truth
Craig Ferguson is best known in America as the host of a very late night talk show, aptly called "The Late, Late Show." However, he's much more than a conversationalist and stand-up comedian. As his autobiography, American on Purpose proves, he can write, and he isn't afraid of telling the ugly truth about himself. With others, he is sparing, but he's quite hard, appropriately so it would seem, on Craig Ferguson.
Starting with a rather unpromising childhood in Glasgow, Scotland, Mr. Ferguson wasn't dealt a particularly good hand from the beginning. Although his parents were quite loving and probably a great deal of fun, not having tuppence is rather hard. School didn't make things any better given the Scottish system back in the 1970s; working class kids got shafted. So, it's no surprise that he developed a hankering for America from an early age -- not that he had any experience of the place until he was a teenager, but the idea of a way out of Glasgow certainly appealed.
As a young adult in Scotland, he found drink and drugs, and worse, they found him. He was, not to put too fine a point on it, a bad lad, and he freely admits that he was "something of a shite" to a lot of people around him who deserved better. Most addicts will confess the same thing, but in his case, he confesses it in writing to anyone who reads the book. Mercifully for him and his fans, he went to rehab and has been sober ever since.
And while substance abuse isn't funny, Mr. Ferguson is funny about what happened to him during that period.
"I don't say this to try to impress you, but I was a bedwetter until around 11 years old, then I stopped, not for long, I started drinking alcohol regularly in my early teens, in which I returned to intermittent bedwetting until I was 29. The thing is when you drink alcohol the way I drank alcohol, it can have a spectacular and flamboyant effect on your bowels when you're asleep. It's one of the more attractive sides of active alcoholism, I think. Occasionally I would wake up to someone, you know, and I'm trying to blame it on them. But it never really worked out."
What also comes through in the book is just how hard Mr. Ferguson has worked to get where he is even before he cleaned up. Touring Britain, Canada and America as a stand-up; creating his act (he wowed the Edinburgh Festival at one stage with a character he called Bing Hitler);writing screenplays and getting the film produced. And being funny five nights a week merely adds to his work load.
Despite all of this, his book goes a bit beyond most memoirs (in addition to its honest which few other titles in the genre possess). He talks about his new country with a love that most native born Americans can't possess because they've not known anything else. Mr. Ferguson has said, "Like all naturalized Americans that I've met, I'm fiercely patriotic. America is a philosophy for me. It's a way of thinking; it's an aspiration, if you like. And so, I do love America very much. I'm very conscious of it." The country is richer for having him as a part of it.
© Copyright 2009 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.
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