It was the night after Johnny Carson died. It seems to me that I have but one learning position and that is when my back is against the wall. When I consider any of the important decisions that I have made in my life, I see that the only reason I made them is that I had no other option. Either the law, other people or my conscience had forced me to make a choice. This is really what happened in the weeks leading up to the monologue that I performed on my show on Feb. 19 of this year. I had become so uncomfortable that I had to do something.

It started with a chance meeting with Kevin Costner at a charity event on the East Coast. I had enormous fun at his expense a few weeks earlier, raking him over the coals on my show for some alleged indiscretion. By that time, though, I had forgotten the monologue and only really remembered it once I was in a conversation with him. In his quiet, polite and gentlemanly way, he let me know he thought I was a jerk—which may or may not be true, but how the hell would he know that? I thought, he can’t make those decisions about me, he doesn’t know a damn thing about me! But, of course, I had done the same to him in a much more public format, with much less class and much less restraint. It really pissed me off. It still does. Dances with Wolves thinks I’m an ---hole! It’s part of my job to poke fun at people, and I do not deny for a second that I enjoy it. But I began to think that maybe my choice of targets was becoming dubious. One of the reasons I got into stand-up comedy was because it was an outsider art, where the only creative executive you had to listen to was the one inside your head. My comedic heroes were men like Bill Hicks, Billy Connolly and Richard Pryor. People who marched to the beat of their own drum, said what they thought and to hell with the consequences. These guys and a few others (Kinison, Young Robin, Young Eddie, et al.) were profane and iconoclastic, irreverent, rude and sometimes disgusting, but there was great joy in their stuff. It could be very mean, but it could also be absurdist and humane. It could be furious. It could be introspective and compassionate and fi lled with regret. It was personal. It had facets. But most important of all, it made me laugh. Like everyone else I only want to watch comedians who make me laugh, and I felt I had been slowly drifting into material that didn’t really do that, but which was capable of feeding the monster (i.e., servicing the 10-15 minute monologue that I perform on CBS five nights a week). I blame myself for this; my references had become lazy—the illiterate chum-sucking pop culture tabloids. Perhaps schadenfroids is more accurate. (By the way, I know how to spell schadenfreude. I was just trying to be clever with the “oid” in tabloid and the “oidy” sound in schadenfreude. I probably shouldn’t have done it. Oh well, too late now. Let’s just try to move on and put it behind us.) Ironically, it was the sleazy nature of entertainment reporting that provided me with an escape route.

On the same weekend that Britney Spears had her very public meltdown, I was in Vancouver doing stand up. I had one show on Saturday and it was great. I felt I was on form, the large crowd was enthusiastic and I was on a high as I left the theater. By then the news reports were coming in: The voyeuristic shots and footage of the now-famous act of self-barbering were all over the place. The images resonated oddly with me, for that same weekend, I was also celebrating 15 years of sobriety. Fifteen years since I even thought about cutting my own hair. I don’t know (or to be honest don’t think it’s really any of my business) whether Ms. Spears is an alcoholic. But her actions reminded me of a time in my own life when I hated who I was so much that I was desperate to change. Desperate to wash the me off of me, or cut it off or just end the whole damn thing. It’s not a wonderful feeling. I decided then that, when I got to work on Monday, I wanted to talk about that time in my life. I felt it was somehow important to reclaim my own show. I wasn’t thinking about not doing jokes at the expense of Britney so much as trying to deliver a different type of monologue that night. The show has a template for this; we have done it a few times. The fi rst was the night after Johnny Carson died when Peter Lassally, the executive producer of my show (and The Tonight Show under Carson’s tenure) and a longtime friend of Mr. Carson’s, encouraged me to just talk about what, if any, Johnny’s impact had been on me.

The night my father died I didn’t feel like cracking wise about ball scores and celebrities, so I talked about my dad instead. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, I talked about where I had been that day. Everybody has their own story. I just told mine. We had been down this road a bit before, and I am so grateful that CBS and Worldwide Pants are willing to give me the freedom to go in this direction from time to time. I would be unable to do the job if they were not so supportive of this. I constructed the bullet points of that night’s monologue with the show’s writing staff. We don’t write the show in the conventional manner. We just get the structure in an order that makes sense to us, then I wing it in front of the camera. This is our usual technique, but for obvious reasons, that day, I was more on my own than usual. So I did it. I talked about my last weekend on the booze, my aborted suicide, my weakness and my failure. And you know what? It felt great. I loved it. I felt like I had taken a hot shower.

The aftermath has been strange. I actually thought I would take a great deal of flak for the show. I thought some people would say I was being sanctimonious, but I was wrong. Apart from a few mad bloggers and a strange bitter editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the reaction was hugely supportive.

I want to stress that the decision I made, the stance I took that night was a personal one. I am not for a moment suggesting that any other comedian or late-night host choose the same targets as me. We don’t all laugh at the same stuff and there is room for everybody. Say what you damn well please. This is America for God’s sake.

I am back to being very picky about what I talk about on television. It makes the job much more diffi cult—and I couldn’t care less. It feels better. Although I bet Kevin Costner still thinks I’m an ---hole.

Source: Written for Emmy® Magazine by Craig Ferguson

Within the first 24 hours of this monologue airing on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, the show received thousands of e-mails from fans. Footage of the monologue aired on The Early Show, Good Morning America, The View and CNN. To watch a video of the monologue that has been viewed over a half a million times on YouTube, visit youtube.com/ watch?v=7bbaRyDLMvA.