THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020 49
we’ll lock into something,” he said.
The track played and Corden lis
tened. “I wonder if he should finish in
a stage split—so deeply inappropriate,”
he said, eying himself in the mirrored
wall. As a physical comedian, he has a
nimble gracelessness that recalls Oli
ver Hardy. “There are not a lot of peo
ple who are entertainers, and by that I
mean people who can gather people
together,” Murphy told me. “That’s
what an entertainer does, and I think
James is that.” Casey Nicholaw, who
directed “The Prom” on Broadway and
is an executive producer of the Netflix
version, arrived, and Corden proposed
that, instead of parodying “West Side
Story,” he could freeze into a preten
tious moderndance pose, à la Martha
Graham. To demonstrate, he leapt into
the arms of two dancers, who spun him
around horizontally. “Is that too much?”
he asked.
“I love it,” Nicholaw said. But Corden
was still noncommittal.
After rehearsal, he drove to the “Late
Late Show” offices in his Range Rover.
I sat in the passenger seat, half expect
ing us to break into song. Instead, Corden
switched on BBC Radio 1, to catch up
on news of the House impeachment
hearings. Corden does not use his own
car for “Carpool Karaoke,” but he told
me that we were following the same
route: “We just drive as far as you can
in a straight line away from the sun and
then turn around and drive back.” Once,
he and Adam Levine got pulled over
for driving too slowly on a freeway. “Just
be careful,” the cop said, when he real
ized who it was.
On Beverly Boulevard, we drove up
to the gates of Television City, where
“The Late Late Show” films. Six weeks
after the show’s première, Corden said,
he went out to lunch and forgot his I.D.
The security guard wouldn’t let him
back in. “But that’s me!” he said, point
ing to a billboard with a giant image of
his face. The guy looked up and said,
“I don’t see it.” Corden recalled, “I was,
like, We’ve been on for six weeks. It was
quite the wakeup call.”
Corden had been reluctant to take
the latenight job. At the time, he was
pitching a singlecamera series and was
also in talks to star on Broadway in “A
Funny Thing Happened on the Way
to the Forum.” Les Moonves, the chief
executive at CBS (who later resigned,
after allegations of sexual misconduct),
had seen Corden in “One Man, Two
Guvnors.” In a meeting with executives,
Corden mentioned that the twelve
thirty slot, which Ferguson was about
to give up, had never made any sense
to him. “Unless you make a show that
will embrace the Internet, it is point
less,” he remembers telling them. “That
show should feel like a party.”
He claims to have been completely
surprised when they then offered him
the show. He declined—the initial offer,
he said, was terrible—but reconsidered
after CBS came back with more money.
Winston, with whom he has a produc
tion company, tried to talk him out of
it. “I said, ‘I think you’re going to get
really frustrated having to be in the
same place every night,’” Winston told
me. But Corden had turned bullish.
“He said, ‘Imagine if we had a blank
piece of paper every single day, and you
could fill that piece of paper with any
thing that you wanted to, and it would
be on the No. 1 network in America.’”
Corden abruptly pulled out of
“Forum,” closed up his newly renovated
London town house, and moved with
his family to Los Angeles. Not sure
how long they’d be there, he and his
wife rented furniture for the first six
months. He and a small staff had only
thirteen weeks to put the show together,
but they decided that Corden’s relative
anonymity was a blessing. “We want to
be a show that’s dripping in a sort of
scrappy ambition,” Corden said. They
knew that they needed a recurring fea
ture, along the lines of Letterman’s “Stu
pid Pet Tricks” or Jay Leno’s “JayWalk
ing.” They remembered a 2011 sketch
that Corden had done for the Comic
Relief telethon in the U.K., in which
Smithy, his character from “Gavin &
Stacey,” drives through London with
George Michael singing Wham! songs.
The segment had been wildly popular,
and Corden, still adjusting to Los An
geles traffic culture, hit on the concept
of “Carpool Karaoke.”
“I’ve never been so sure that an idea
would work,” he said. “But what I didn’t
know is that we wouldn’t be able to get
anybody to do it.” Everyone the book
ers approached declined, until a chance
encounter with a publicist from Ma
riah Carey’s label led to their first bigget. More followed: Jennifer Hudson,
Justin Bieber. After Stevie Wonder ap
peared in a segment, one of his great
esthits albums jumped to the top of
the U.K. iTunes charts, turning “Car
pool Karaoke” into a promotional bo
nanza. Publicists started pitching their
clients, and musicians whom the show
had been chasing, such as Chris Mar
tin, suddenly came around.S
ince the 2016 election, latenight
hosts have had to reëxamine the role
of comedy in a dystopian news cycle
that seems funnier than it is. Stephen
Colbert, whose show precedes Cor
den’s—and who, upon starting that job,
in 2015, had shed his patented conser
vativeblowhard character from “The
Colbert Report”—found his footing
only after Donald Trump won, and he
now leads in the ratings. Rather than
lean into political satire, Corden has
stuck to his strengths: musical numbers,
silly games, and highconcept stunts.
Whereas “The Daily Show” and its de
scendants have repositioned comedians
as public intellectuals, Corden goes for
the antic mood of a variety show. The
contrast with Colbert is deliberate. “No
where else in television would you be,
like, ‘From eight till nine we’re going to
have a hospital drama, and then from
nine till ten we’re going to have another
hospital drama with the same diseases,”
he told me. But frivolity in the age of
Trump also has its pitfalls. During the
2016 campaign, Fallon was denounced
for playfully mussing Trump’s hair when
he came on the “Tonight Show” as a
guest. Corden encountered a bit of
similar backlash after the 2017 Emmy
Awards, where he was photographed
backstage kissing Sean Spicer on the
cheek. He quickly defused the situation
in his monologue the next night, jok
ing, “Now, I know you think that’s a
picture of me kissing Sean Spicer, but,
in the spirit of Sean Spicer: no, it isn’t.”
When Corden addresses politics, it’s
often filtered through vaudeville. The
day that Trump announced his ban on
transgender people in the military, Cor
den sang a parody of the Nat King Cole
standard “LOVE,” retooled as “LG
BT.” In less than six hours, the num
ber was written, rehearsed, and staged,
with a quartet of tophatted dancers.
Like Jimmy Kimmel, who, in 2017, as