“It’s all just telling stories,” Ferguson says. “Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it’s faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up—that stuff is very similar.”
That’s not to say he thinks any of it is easy. When he first met Lassally, who was in charge of finding a replacement for the departing Kilborn, “I said, ‘Thank you for having me, Mr. Lassally. This will be a lark,’” Ferguson recalls. “And he said—and I remember this as clear as day—‘No, no. This is not a lark. I have few discernible talents, but one of them is finding guys like you, and if I’m right, you’re lightning in a bottle.’”
Lassally, who had to convince both Letterman and CBS head Les Moonves to hire Ferguson, says his first impression of Ferguson was that “he was intelligent and had a great presence, a great sense of humor, a quick wit—he was just comfortable with himself.” Still, there were things Ferguson needed to learn: For one, to kick his bad habit of flapping his jacket open. And, he adds, “apparently when I’m nervous, I have this creepy laugh.” Lassally emphasized that Ferguson needed to stay calm. “He taught me one huge thing about comedy,” Ferguson says, “which is that adrenaline is not my friend. At 12:30 in someone’s house, they don’t need some yelling foreigner with a creepy laugh.”
Fortunately, he found a way to deal with his adrenaline: flying lessons, which Cunningham gave him for his birthday. “After the first 15 hours, I stopped crying,” he says. “I was so terrified, beyond anything I could imagine. Then it started to change. Now I’m totally riveted by it.”
In February he received his pilot’s license (one day after he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen) and bought a Cessna, which he takes out three or four times a week. “Aviation and physics don’t care about how you’re doing in the 18-to-24 demo,” he says. “There are hard-and-fast rules.” Those are just about the only ones Ferguson feels compelled to follow these days: “Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me.”
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