46 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
PROFILES
MR. HAPPINESS
James Corden thinks that his job as a late-night host is to spread joy.
BY MICHAELSCHULMAN
S
ay you host a late-night talk show
and you have Paul McCartney as
a guest. He’s game for anything.
When Jimmy Fallon had this oppor-
tunity, in the fall of 2018, the “Tonight
Show” came up with a benign prank.
Tour groups at 30 Rockefeller Plaza
were herded into an elevator. When
the elevator doors opened, they saw a
tableau of Fallon and McCartney play-
ing Ping-Pong, or sitting in armchairs,
smoking pipes. Each time, a camera
would catch the elevator full of tour-
ists gasping and screaming like teen-
agers in 1964. Then, before they could
process what they’d seen, the doors
would close. The routine, which has
been watched more than four million
times on YouTube, is amusing, in the
vein of “Candid Camera.” McCartney
is used as a sight gag, an animal in a
celebrity zoo, with the ordinary folks—
themselves on display—gawking from
outside the cage.
When James Corden booked Mc-
Cartney, in June of the same year, he
came up with something much more
elaborate. CBS’s “The Late Late Show,”
which Corden will have hosted for five
years this March, was on location in
England, where Corden is from, and
devised a special edition of “Carpool
Karaoke,” the show’s signature feature.
In a typical sequence, Corden drives a
Range Rover through the streets of Los
Angeles with a famous musician in the
passenger seat, and a dashboard cam-
era captures the two of them singing
along to the guest’s hits. “Carpool Kar-
aoke” videos are exuberant and almost
guaranteed to go viral. There’s a de-
mocratizing effect to seeing celebrities
experience their music the way the av-
erage commuter does—belting along
to the AM radio, the real world glid-
ing by. Corden acts as a kind of Every-
fan, asking his guests softball questions
and cajoling them into making wacky
pit stops. When Cardi B did “Carpool
Karaoke,” she and Corden drove to a
senior center, and she rapped for a geri-
atric dance class.
The McCartney edition was filmed
in Liverpool. It begins with Corden
and McCartney singing along to “Drive
My Car,” Corden honking the horn in
time with each “Beep beep, beep beep,
yeah!” On Penny Lane, they break into
“Penny Lane.” McCartney points out
personal landmarks through the win-
dow: “I used to be in the choir at that
church.” They stop at the barbershop
that inspired the first verse of “Penny
Lane,” where all the people that come
and go stop and say hello. Crowds
gather. “Last time I was around here,
certainly nobody was noticing me at
all,” McCartney says on the street.
Back in the car, he tells Corden a
story: during a stressful period in the
late sixties, his mother, who had died
years before, appeared to him in a dream
and comforted him by saying, “Let it
be.” He and Corden harmonize on the
anthem that resulted. Corden, choked
up, recalls the first time that he heard
the song, when his father and grand-
father, both musicians, played it for him.
“If my granddad was here right now,
he’d get an absolute kick out of this,”
Corden says. McCartney, eyes fixed on
the road, replies, “He is.”
They pull up to 20 Forthlin Road,
the house McCartney lived in during
his teens, now a National Trust site. He
shows Corden the room where he and
John Lennon finished writing “She
Loves You.” He plays “When I’m Sixty-
Four” on an old upright piano. More
crowds have gathered outside, and Mc-
Cartney jauntily shakes hands on the
way back to the car. They drive to a
pub on Hope Street where McCartney
played when he was young. Corden
goes in alone and stands behind the
bar; he encourages a woman to choose
a song on the jukebox. Suddenly, a cur-
tain opens, and there’s McCartney and
a four-piece band, playing “A Hard
Day’s Night.” The people in the pub,
young and old alike, freak out at the
sight of the home-town hero. McCart-
ney performs “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”
and “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Then Corden
joins him for a duet of “Hey Jude.” The
surprise set is euphoric and inclusive:
part block party, part time machine.
Even McCartney seems transported.
The video, which is twenty-three min-
utes long, has been watched on You-
Tube nearly fifty million times.
Corden, who is forty-one, sees his
show as a delivery system for happi-
ness. Unlike his more nihilistic con-
temporaries in British comedy—Ricky
Gervais, Steve Coogan, Armando Ian-
nucci—he believes that entertainers
have a responsibility to combat cyni-
cism and spread joy. “The Late Late
Show” airs at twelve-thirty-five in the
morning, and, although it slightly trails
NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers”
in live ratings, it produces a steady sup-
ply of viral videos. “Carpool Karaoke”
has attracted such stars as Lady Gaga,
Adele, Elton John, Barbra Streisand,
and Michelle Obama, who, as First
Lady, took a spin around the White
House grounds while singing “Signed,
Sealed, Delivered.” The show does not
view its target audience as insomniacs
and stoned college students. “The pol-
icy that we came in with was: this show
launches at twelve-thirty,” Ben Winston,
an executive producer, told me. “Our
competition isn’t whatever else is on at
twelve-thirty-seven. It’s what’s on the
next morning at breakfast. It’s what’s
on your computer at work.” Within
fourteen months of the show’s première,
its YouTube channel had exceeded a
billion views.
Corden was an unlikely choice for
the job (aside from being white and
male, as most late-night hosts still are).
He made his name in British televi-
sion as a co-creator and star of the BBC
