Craig Ferguson brings politics-free comedy tour to Detroit

Craig Ferguson's latest vehicle purchase reflects that, while he is Scottish by birth, he's an American by choice.

The former “Late Late Show” host is driving across the United States in a Dodge Ram 1500 for his Fancy Rascal comedy tour, set to arrive Friday at Detroit’s Music Hall.

Ferguson admits to having a “weakness” for enormous U.S. trucks. In fact, he recently asked his 2.6 million Twitter followers to vote on whether he should get an F-150 or a Ram 1500 Big Horn for the tour. The results were 51.3% for the Ford, 48.7% for the Dodge.

“I’ll tell you the truth. By the time I put the poll on Twitter, I’d already bought the Ram. It was more of an opinion poll, and I was like, ‘You guys suck! I got the Ram 1500!’ But it was a close call,” he said by phone.

Ferguson is best known for spending 2005 to 2014 on the air after "The Late Show with David Letterman" on CBS. During his "Late Late Show" tenure, he developed a reputation for turning interviews into unexpected, sometimes revealing conversations and favoring offbeat touches like his sidekicks: robot skeleton sidekick Geoff Peterson and pantomime horse Secretariat.

Ferguson’s past credits include being a punk rocker, hosting a prime-time game show (ABC’s “The Hustler”) and a Sirius XM show and writing novels, screenplays and memoirs. In 2009, the year after he became a U.S. citizen, he published a candid memoir about his journey to his adopted country, “American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot.”

With his first standup comedy tour in its early days, Ferguson would rather not talk about politics during this interview or onstage.

“There will be some mention of what went on in the planet Earth for the last three years, but we’re keeping it light,” he said. “I’m not political at all in the act. I’m a human being. I have political opinions. Of course I do. It’s a stylistic choice.”

As for that style, he’s often been described as quirky and iconoclastic. Even within the confines of network TV, Ferguson marched to the beat of his own late-night talk drummer. In 2010, he did an experimental episode of “The Late Late Show” that dispensed with a studio audience and devoted the episode to him talking to British actor/writer Stephen Fry. At the time, then-Entertainment Weekly critic Ken Tucker called it “one of the best hours of TV I’ve seen in a while.”

The following year, Ferguson taped several shows in Paris, where he was virtually unknown, and performed irreverent bits like sliding on the floor of Versailles with actress (and metro Detroit native) Kristen Bell.

Ferguson’s approach to his current tour seems equally nonconformist. Although he’s appearing at the sort of large venues reserved for big-name performers, he is foregoing planes and tour buses and instead driving from gig to gig with his tour manager.

“Basically, I road trip with my buddy,” he said.

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He jokes that his goal is to maintain his current weight, give or take 15 pounds of road-trip snacking. Asked to describe a favorite free-time activity, the self-described “aviation geek” says he always enjoys visiting aviation museums. When informed that the Yankee Air Museum, a Smithsonian-affiliated aerospace and science museum in Belleville, is about 30 miles from Music Hall, he says enthusiastically, “I’m definitely going.”

For the past three years, Ferguson says, he has coped with the pandemic the way he always does, one day at a time. He came down with COVID-19 twice, but luckily had no major complications.

“I don’t want to be controversial, but I’m against it. I’m against COVID,” he said in deadpan seriousness.

He divides his time between the United States and rural Scotland. His Twitter account is peppered with photos of various animals in bucolic Scottish country settings. Asked if he lives in a castle, Ferguson goes into a riff.

“I don’t know if you know this, but everyone in Scotland lives in a castle and we all talk like Sean Connery," he said. "If you haven't gone, you must go and have a look. It’s like everyone in Detroit has a giant-sized vehicle. Everyone in Scotland has a castle. The same thing.”

There has been talk of Ferguson launching a podcast, which he confirms, kind of.

“I have an idea to do an interview show and I’ve been talking to some people about doing it," he said. "They’re keen for me to do it and I am keen to do it, too. But it’s just, I’m a little leery because I don’t really think I do interviews, to be honest ... I’m not a journalist. I’m not a trained broadcaster. I’m just lucky in a sense that I like to talk to people and I’m interested in what they have to say.”

For now, he’s content to tour and see parts of the country like Detroit again.

“My auntie Betty, my mother’s little sister, looked after me a lot when I was a kid," he said. "… She loved American Motown. She’d lullaby me with Motown music when I was a baby.”

Ferguson acknowledges there is much interest in the United Kingdom for Detroit and, really, for the whole of America.

“I think people in the UK are fascinated by Americans," he says. "They always make these documents about, ‘Aren’t Americans bonkers?' They try and find the maddest person in America to interview. They find some guy that lives in a dumpster, that’s got a hat that says, ‘Who farted?’ on it. They say, ‘This is what everybody in America is like.' And I'm not denying there are some, but it’s not everybody.”

By the way, exactly where is he during this phone chat?

“I’m 62 miles west of Lincoln, Nebraska,” he said.

Is it flat there?

Ferguson describes the landscape as "awesome" in size and brings up the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” novel series in his unexpected, sometimes revealing way.

“There’s a torture device in it called the Total Perspective Vortex, (where) they put people in and they get to see what size they actually are in (comparison to) the universe, and people just go insane when they realize it,” he muses.

“And sometimes driving across the Midwest, I think this might be what the Total Perspective Vortex looks like.”

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

Craig Ferguson

The Fancy Rascal Tour

8 p.m. Friday

Music Hall, Detroit

Tickets are $45-$60 and available at www.MusicHall.org.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Craig Ferguson won't be talking politics on his new U.S. comedy tour