The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [78]
He escaped in his teens, but the scars lasted. Ferguson could never sit for training of any kind because of his “abhorrence of the early years of my academic life. I couldn’t trust anyone who was willing to give me information.” That left him to pursue interests he could teach himself, like drumming, a hobby he fell into mostly because the punk world attracted him and playing in a punk rock band had the perfect subversive appeal. As with most things he tried, Ferguson proved himself to be quickly adept and he landed in a band called Bastards from Hell (later softened to Dreamboys). He was funny, too, of course, but humor had been of so little use in his life to that point that he considered it unworthy of his time or attention, except in the pursuit of girls who dug guys who could make them laugh. The band’s lead singer, Peter Capaldi (who later enjoyed a successful career as an actor), pushed Ferguson to give comedy a shot.
That meant standing up in pubs and trying to get irascible drunks to laugh—fierce but useful training. Ferguson had a Scottish comedy model in Billy Connolly, known in Scotland as the Big Yin (the Big One). He was “like Elvis” to Ferguson. “I’d never seen people from my socioeconomic group make it big, and suddenly there was this guy.”
And soon after, Bing Hitler was born. Bing was a product of the terror Ferguson felt getting up there as himself in front of those drunks. “I had to create a voice, because then if you fail, it’s not you who fail.” He also wanted a name with marquee shock value. And he got it. Just twenty-four, Ferguson debuted Bing Hitler at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1986 and for a time became a Scottish sensation, filling three-thousand-seat theaters in Glasgow. Wearing too tight jackets, his hair teased up into a Scottish fro, Bing bellowed at his audiences, a crude caricature of an angry, obnoxious Scottish jingoist. Bing railed furiously about everything that annoyed him in life, from people to insects. “I may have gone a little too far with that name,” Ferguson conceded. “But there was no crooning or fascism.”
What the character did was provide the confidence for Craig to emerge as a stand-up on his own terms. He was club toughened and ready for a big comedy career, but the combination of drink and his restless nature pushed him in different directions. The drink led all the way down to contemplation of suicide; the restlessness, out onto the stage, first as Brad Majors in The Rocky Horror Show and then as Oscar Madison in an all-Scottish version of The Odd Couple. (With the simple substitute of soccer for baseball, it all worked.)
Tall, with piercing blue eyes and a head of dense dark hair, Ferguson morphed from slightly pudgy to moodily handsome as he hit his thirties. He had little trouble landing roles—or women. He was in and out of a string of relationships and a couple of marriages. The drink and drugs sabotaged most of his personal dealings, but he still got work. Finally, in 1992, the sheer enormity of the degradation he was visiting upon himself overwhelmed him, and he got sober, once and forever. “I proved to myself to my own satisfaction that I am madder than I think and I just can’t do that. I really can’t. It was a realization that there’s a darkness in here that’s bigger than you. I just don’t go to that part of the house.”
Ferguson moved to the United States two years later, a lifelong dream after having visited an uncle in Long Island as a boy. Work followed in short order: a role in a sitcom,