Comedian Craig Ferguson, who is best known in the U.S. as the former host of The Late Late Show, is getting ready to launch his first podcast.
His series Joy, A Podcast, which comes from iHeartPodcast, launches on August 1 and you can listen to the trailer below.
The show will see him interview a broad range of guests from the the worlds of entertainment, science and government as he asks “How’s our Joy doing? Bridled? On life support? Where do we find joy in a world that seems by any rational measure to be collapsing around us?”.
The first set of guests includes Gabriel Iglesias, Tony Hawk, Angela Kinsey, Kathie Lee Gifford, Diedrich Bader, Lewis Black, Wendie Malick, Shirley Manson, and Tom Papa.
Ferguson told Deadline admitted that he’s been thinking about the audio medium for a while.
“I feel like I’d let everyone down by not doing a podcast. I feel like I’m the last person to have a podcast. I couldn’t really see a way to do it for a while. I had to have an idea for it, I don’t want it to just be me talking on Zoom to people that I met once,” he said. “Eventually, I came up with the idea for this one. This makes me feel good.”
Ferguson compares the idea to BBC series Desert Island Discs, which is ostensibly about music, but is not really about music. “It is a little bit like there’s Desert Island Discs in the sense that it’s not really about the format. It’s about the guests. The drive of Desert Island Discs is obviously music, but the drive of this is about how you cope. How do you see your way out of the darkness? How do you shake off the demons? How do you form your own personal St. Anthony?”
While the first tranche of guests are largely in the comedy and entertainment space, Ferguson would like to expand that out in future episodes. “It’s my hope, as time goes on with it, is that I can talk to people who are not in showbusiness and who may have a challenging or different approach to joy. For example, if you talk to a homicide detective or a pediatric oncologist, these are very difficult, catastrophic at times, things to deal with. So how do you survive? Because joy is a coping mechanism,” he added.
Listen/watch the trailer below.
