52 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
weird (a man finding a half-smoked
joint in his Popeyes chicken sandwich).
Corden read through the script silently,
jotting down notes, as the writers flipped
the pages along with him. The Pelosi
bit called for a mockup of her doing a
keg stand, in contrast to her professed
prayerfulness. The joke had been held
over from the previous day, when Corden
had asked his staff, “What’s a keg stand?”
Other American concepts that have
needed explaining include the electoral
college and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”
At three o’clock, Corden walked
down a hallway to the set, for rehearsal.
Onstage, he stood on his mark—a sticker
for West Ham United, his Premier
League football club—and ran through
the monologue. Afterward, the writers
huddled around his desk. Corden tapped
his pen, frowning. “I didn’t enjoy a lot
of this,” he said, more uncomfortable
than annoyed. “That’s my overwhelm-
ing feeling.” Winston suggested that a
joke about Pelosi’s accusing the Presi-
dent of bribery (“He offered her ten
thousand dollars to take it back”) needed
a better setup.
“And then I thought this photo of
the keg stand is not good,” Corden con-
tinued. Winston agreed—besides, they
had made a similar joke about Pelosi on
a previous episode. The bit was scrapped.
“Now, what about the chicken sand-
wich?” Winston asked.
“I hated that one,” Corden said.
“So why don’t we lose that chicken
story?” Winston said. They kept another
drugs-in-strange-places anecdote, about
a group of wild boars that had got into
a stash of cocaine in Italy. (The graph-
ics team had whipped up an image of a
boar in a “Miami Vice” suit.) The writ-
ers, undaunted, returned to their sta-
tions. “I’m going to have a drink tonight,”
Corden said. “Get real fucking loose!”
“God help us,” Winston muttered.
Back in his office, Corden and his
staff planned upcoming sketches, in-
cluding a “Masked Singer” parody with
Josh Gad and Adam Lambert. At four-
twenty, he changed into his suit and sat
in a dressing room, where a stylist ap-
plied hair spray. The writers gathered
around in a horseshoe, and Corden read
the revised monologue. Seeming pleased,
he asked the stylist to spritz all the writ-
ers with Japanese seawater. Before he
got up, Crabbe handed him a sheet of
paper and said, “There’s something we’d
like to do in Act 6 from the desk.” It
was a heartfelt statement about the Santa
Clarita shooting, including a dig at “pol-
iticians without the moral courage to
address gun laws.” Crabbe and Win-
ston had distilled it from discussions
they’d had with Corden throughout the
day. Corden nodded and handed it back.
In the greenroom, outfitted with a
Foosball table and a wall of prizes (in-
cluding a gold YouTube Creator Award,
for exceeding a million subscribers),
Corden greeted Johnson, Singh, and
the musical guest, the band Sleater-
Kinney. Reggie Watts, his bandleader,
had not yet arrived; he usually strolls in
within ten minutes of showtime. While
a warmup guy revved the crowd, Corden
stood backstage and reviewed the mono-
logue one last time, and the stylist
brushed his lapel. Gronk appeared—all
six and a half feet of him—and gave
Corden an excited bro handshake. Then,
at five o’clock, Corden walked onstage.
The show went smoothly. The Pelosi
jokes landed, including a new one about
how “Prayerful” sounds like the third
track on a Kanye West album. Gronk
interpreted an emoji headline about a
Malaysian man who had got his penis
stuck in a drainpipe. Don Johnson told
a story about meeting Mick Jagger at
Live Aid. Finally, the lights dimmed,
and Corden delivered his Santa Clar-
ita speech to a hushed audience. Back
in his office, as he changed into sneak-ers, I noted that he had just segued from
impeachment jokes to a penis emoji
headline to a sombre acknowledgment
of a school shooting.
“And that’s just Thursday,” Corden
said nonchalantly. “What a life, eh?”C
orden grew up just outside High
Wycombe, England, which he de-
scribes as “a sort of shit bit between
London and Oxford.” (Its main attrac-
tion is a collection of Windsor chairs.)One evening in December, his father,
Malcolm, picked me up at the train sta-
tion there. A sweet, cue-ball-headed
man, he recently retired as a Chris-
tian-book salesman, but he still plays
clarinet in a Royal Air Force Voluntary
Band; that afternoon, he’d performed
at a veterans’ home. His own father, Kim
Corden, was a big-band leader. Kim-
berley, Malcolm explained, is a family
name—his grandfather was christened
just after the British victory in the Siege
of Kimberley, during the Second Boer
War, in 1900—and extends to his son,
James Kimberley Corden.
In Hazlemere, the suburb that the
family has lived in since James was six,
Malcolm drove me past a supermarket
where his son, as a teen-age employee,
“tried to purloin some of the goods.”
We pulled into the Cordens’ driveway,
and Malcolm took his clarinet and music
stand from the trunk. In the house, his
wife, Margaret, a retired social worker,
was resting in an armchair. “Marg’s just
had a new left knee,” Malcolm explained.
The cream-colored living room was
adorned with a small Christmas tree
and a miniature manger scene. Mal-
colm brought me a cup of tea with choc-
olate-ginger biscuits and mince pie.
Margaret was raised as a member of
the Salvation Army, which Malcolm
joined when they met. James, born in
1978, was the second of three children,
and the church was central to his early
life. “On Sundays, everyone you know
puts on a uniform, marches through
the town, and sings ‘Onward, Chris-
tian Soldiers,’” Corden recalled. He
later grew disillusioned: “The entire
church that I went to, from what I can
realize now, was full of some of the least
Christian people I’ve ever come across
in my life.” His parents have since left
for the Church of England, despite
Margaret’s rank, in the Army, of Young
People’s Sergeant-Major.
As a child, Corden was “strong-
willed” and “very mischievous,” his
mother told me. At his younger sister’s
christening, when he was four, he pulled
faces while standing at the altar. “I re-
member turning around and looking
back through my legs, and people gig-
gling,” Corden said. “And then going
back and sitting down and staring at
the back of the person in front of me,
thinking, Well, this is boring. Why are