50 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
lawmakers were debating the repeal of
Obamacare, opened his show with an
emotional speech about his infant son’s
heart problems, Corden is selective in
his earnestness. Last September, after
Bill Maher ended an episode of his
HBO show with an appeal to bring
back fat-shaming (“We have gone to
this weird place where fat is good”),
Corden delivered a pointed eight-min-
ute rebuttal. “I’ve struggled my entire
life trying to manage my weight, and I
suck at it,” he told the camera, adding,
“We’re not all as lucky as Bill Maher,
you know? We don’t all have a sense of
superiority that burns thirty-five thou-
sand calories a day.”
Corden said that he and his writers
had spent three days working on the
speech, but held it an extra day, un-
satisfied with the tone. “I was, like, We
can only do this if it’s funny,” he said.
“It can’t be a rant.” They added jokes,
including one about fat people being
tempted by pies on a windowsill. Maher,
normally eager to have the last word,
did not respond. “I just think it’s out of
touch with actual people,” Corden said,
of Maher’s derisive attitude. “You can-
not forget what most people’s lives are
like. You cannot forget how fucking
hard it is. And maybe the only slice of
joy in your life is that cheeseburger. And
it’s cheap. There are no chubby kids at
my son’s school, because it’s a private
school on the West Side of L.A.”
Corden was speaking over dinner,
his only meal that day. Although he
wouldn’t mind losing twenty pounds,
he rarely makes an issue of his weight.
(Recently, his writers came up with a
list of insults of their boss for a roast
segment. Corden’s favorite was “You
look like someone tried to carve Matt
Damon out of butter.”) One of his first
jobs, in England, was on the soap opera
“Hollyoaks,” playing a college janitor.
For a scene set in the character’s bed-
room, he was appalled to see that the
set designer had decorated the walls
with posters of junk food. He refused
to film the scene until they were taken
down. “I thought that they were just
really being nasty about anyone that’s
overweight,” he told me. “I remember
saying to the guy, ‘I don’t know one per-
son who would take a picture of a hot
dog and a burger and stick them on the
wall.’” I wondered about his character
in “Cats,” the gluttonous feline Busto-
pher Jones, who gorges on garbage—
wasn’t he a walking fat joke? “Oh, but
he’s revelling in it,” Corden said. “He’s
going, ‘I’m the greatest! I’m big and I’m
fat and I live the best life! I eat every-
thing! It’s incredible.’”T
he formula for American late-night
shows has stayed remarkably con-
sistent for six decades. In 1954, Steve
Allen began hosting a ninety-minute
show on NBC called “Tonight Starring
Steve Allen,” which became the “To-
night Show.” Although his tenure was
short, it brought about such lasting in-
novations as the desk, the couch, and
the monologue. Jack Paar, who took
over in 1957, was a member of the Al-
gonquin Round Table and imported his
skill for celebrity banter. Johnny Car-
son took the reins in 1962 and didn’t let
go for thirty years. He didn’t reinvent
the “Tonight Show” so much as build
it into a cornerstone of American cul-
ture, a monolith even in fractious times.
In the late seventies, he pulled in more
than seventeen million viewers a night.
Carson’s Pax Romana gave way, in
the early nineties, to a Cold War of Leno
versus Letterman. They retained the
desk, the couch, the monologue, and the
celebrity chitchat, but they had sharply
contrasting styles: Leno was county-fair
broad and inoffensive, while Letterman
was bone-dry and ironic. Leno’s not-
quite-departure, in 2009, kicked off an-
other succession drama. Conan O’Brien
got the “Tonight Show,” but Leno stuck
around, Pope Benedict-style, in the
ten-o’clock slot. The resulting skirmish
ended with O’Brien’s premature exit
(he’s now on TBS) and Leno’s return
to the “Tonight Show,” until he finally
ceded it to Fallon, in 2014. At CBS, Let-
terman’s handoff to Colbert was rela-
tively frictionless, but by then late-night
television was fragmenting into cable
and online platforms, all competing for
smaller slices of the pie. “The ratings
have gone totally to shit,” one late-night
producer told me. “You’re fighting over
such tiny pieces of the audience that it’s
pretty irrelevant.”
Corden has tweaked the formula ever
so slightly. Instead of interviewing guests
one by one, bumping them down the
couch as the show unfolds, he brings
them out together, for more of a din-ner-party feeling, a format he borrowed
from British chat-show hosts such as
Graham Norton. The set, dotted with
lampshades, resembles a homey caba-
ret. A few rows of audience seats are
placed in front of the cameras, for extra
intimacy; Corden told me that he wanted
the atmosphere of a “cozy playground.”
One Thursday in November, Corden
arrived at the studio at 11 A.M., for Ep-
isode No. 702. The news had already
thrown him a curveball: two teen-agers
had been killed that morning in a school
shooting in Santa Clarita. That eve-
ning’s show was supposed to include a
game called Flinch, in which celebrities
are positioned behind a pane of glass
and try to stand still as a cannon fires
fruits and vegetables at them. Corden
and his executive producers, Winston
and Rob Crabbe, had decided to can-
cel it. “Not that it involves a gun in any
way, but still it felt insensitive,” Corden
told me in his office. “I’m not sure what
we’re going to do.” They quickly subbed
in a game called Emoji News, in which
audience members have to guess topi-
cal headlines spelled out in emojis.
At noon, two segment producers
came in to prep Corden on that eve-
ning’s guests: the weathered heartthrob
Don Johnson and the millennial Indian-
Canadian YouTube star Lilly Singh,
who also hosts a 1:35 a.m. show on
NBC. The producers, who had con-
ducted preliminary interviews, ran
through a series of questions and the
tidy anecdotes they would elicit. “Don,
big month coming up,” Corden read
from a packet. “You turn seventy. You
look sensational. What’s the secret?”
“Cocaine!” a producer joked. The
other producer said, “Um, he no lon-
ger eats carbs, sugars, or bread.”
Winston interrupted the meeting
to announce that Rob Gronkowski,
the former tight end for the New En-
gland Patriots, known as Gronk, would
be in the audience. “Feel free to call
him out or surprise him on air,” he said.
“Emoji News!” someone said. “He
can be one of the contestants.”
Next, a gaggle of monologue writers
filed in. The “mono,” as the British
staffers called it, had already been whit-
tled down from about a hundred jokes
to seventeen, covering political headlines
(Nancy Pelosi calling the impeachment
hearings “prayerful”) and news of the