‘Craig Ferguson: Tickle Fight’ On Netflix Suggests Trump Means S*** In Scottish

As a late-night talk-show host, Craig Ferguson proved himself amazingly charming, more sincere, thoughtful and willing to go off script than any Americans might have suspected from a Scottish actor they only best remembered as a supporting player on The Drew Carey Show.

From 2005-2014, Ferguson kept us giggling and guessing on The Late Late Show on CBS.

Now three years removed from his nightly appointments with America, what does he have to say for himself? For one thing, Donald Trump’s political career has made Ferguson regret he ever left. He cannot imagine anyone having as much confidence as our current president, despite all of the evidence suggesting otherwise. So, leaning into the fraying relationship between politicians, media and the truth, Ferguson lays this dubious claim: “Where I come from, the word ‘trump’ means shit!” Pause for laughs and applause. “That’s not true. But if somebody Tweets it…”

Ferguson isn’t about to go to satirical war here, though. Far from it. His fourth stand-up special, and first for Netflix, is called Craig Ferguson: Tickle Fight for good reason.

Instead, when Ferguson addresses the divisiveness in America in 2017, he directs it toward his beard instead of toward the current occupant of the White House. Ferguson, after all, did open his Late Late Show monologues each night with “It’s a great day for America!” He reminisces that audiences never got upset at anything he talked about on TV, only calling and emailing with nasty feedback whenever he attempted to grow facial hair. Which he pokes fun of, while also describing his body hair as full of different mustache styles. Self-deprecation is still allowable, while Ferguson wonders if any other targets haven’t yet become off-limits now.

“You can’t make fun of anyone. Actually not even Germans, they have to be Germans from the 1940s,” Ferguson notes, before quickly adding: “No, you can make fun of Germans. They don’t care.”

Ferguson has a roundabout cheeky, tangential style to his stand-up. Think of it perhaps as six or seven different late-night monologues, stitched together tenuously. He even acknowledges onstage that he may only tell one actual joke in an hour, because he calls himself “easily sidetracked.”

Tickle fight becomes a go-to phrase for Ferguson to describe scenarios in his stories that begin harmlessly before devolving, sometimes quite literally, into shit.

In one story, he leans on his previous connections with Italian-Americans in New York City to bail an employee out of jail (and worse) in Las Vegas. You’ll never look at a magician’s appearance on Ferguson’s Late Late Show the same way again. In another tale, he explains the thoughtful intricacies of Japanese bathroom technology. In a third, he finds a way to combine his medical pain and his smartphone addiction for a solution that brings a smile to his face. And in the actual joke he promises to tell in this hour, Ferguson updates an ancient Egyptian story with help from Drew Carey? Spoiler alert: All of these stories eventually get trumped. Pardon Ferguson’s Scottish.

He realizes his stand-up persona might not match your expectations if you’re just now seeing him perform solo for the first time: “You’re not the guy we made up in our heads when we were watching free TV when we were high? We don’t recognize you!”

In his mid-50s, Ferguson has few vices left. He has stopped drinking, drugging, eating meat or consuming dairy products.

But like every other big-name comedian, he did film a stand-up special for Netflix this year. And managed to work the streaming giant into his act, citing a documentary he saw there for making him go vegan. “It doesn’t behoove me to say it, but you know who I blame: Netflix. Fuckers! My guess is this will be cut out.”

Guess again.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Craig Ferguson: Tickle Fight on Netflix