THE SCOT WHO CONQUERED AMERICA

The rise of Craig Ferguson

The star of the show at George Bush's farewell dinner for the press was a reformed alcoholic from Glasgow who is fast becoming one of America's top comedians. Andrew Gumbel reports

Craig Ferguson has made something of an art of lowering expectations about himself and then sneaking up on his audiences, almost unawares, and worming his way into their heart. He's been unknown for so long - or, rather, out on the very margins of show business celebrity - that his obscurity has, in some ways, turned into his greatest asset.

Who am I talking about? The need to ask the question addresses the point all by itself. Ferguson is a 45-year-old Scottish-born comedian, screenwriter, author, actor, reformed alcoholic and all- round bundle of creative energy who barely took the time to raise his profile in Britain before heading to the other side of the Atlantic 14 years ago.

For the past three years, he's been quietly establishing a reputation in the United States as the host of The Late, Late Show on CBS, the comedy chat show that follows on directly from David Letterman and attracts a fanbase of insomniacs, college students and returning party-goers who turn on the telly to try to sober up before they go to bed.

His fans love him, but don't talk about him much. When it emerged a few days ago that his show had started winning the ratings battle against the direct competition - Conan O'Brien's late-night programme on NBC, it surprised just about everyone except the 1.8 million or so viewers who tune in to him regularly.

Now his obscurity may be fading for good, thanks to his appearance at the weekend as the top-line entertainment at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. This is a notoriously hard gig for any comedian. It's not easy to be funny when George Bush is sitting just two seats away, and Dick Cheney locks his beady eyes on you.

It's not easy to decide whether to be cutting or sycophantic, ultra-political or harmless, aggressive or sweet. Worst of all, it's a lousy crowd - journalists, political operatives, ambassadors and Washington officials - all of whom take themselves ridiculously seriously and have both high expectations and a low threshold of tolerance for any perception that the comedic jabs are directed at them.

Two years ago, the satirical comedian Stephen Colbert demonstrated perhaps the greatest courage of any White House dinner speaker, subtly and hilariously ripping the heart out of the Bush administration, and the US press corps which has failed so dramatically to hold him to account. Colbert's performance achieved instant classic status thanks to its ready accessibility on YouTube, but it also went down like a ton of bricks in the room itself. The screenwriter and director Nora Ephron remarked at the time that Colbert had shown it was possible for a comedian to kill and bomb at the same time.

Adding to the challenge facing Ferguson was the fact that this was Mr Bush's swansong as President. Do you really kick a man when he's on his way out the door? And, if not, what do you do? Ferguson's answer was to take refuge in his single favourite comic shelter - extreme self-deprecation. "I can't tell you how excited I am to be here," he started out. "I realise many of you may not share that excitement given that you have no idea who I am."

He then explained, patiently, that his show went out well after midnight on CBS. He was, he said, "all they could afford after they finished Katie Couric" - the super-expensive newsreader whose efforts to revive the CBS evening news have been an embarrassing flop. He then remarked that the crowd at the dinner was so notoriously tough no American comic wanted the job. "Just another case of immigrants taking jobs that Americans don't want," he deadpanned.

In just the first couple of minutes, he had asserted his unassuming charm and, for the most part, won the room over. After that, he had much freer rein - cracking jokes about Los Angeles and the Democratic presidential nominees, excoriating the pomposity of The New York Times, which decided not to buy a table at the dinner this year on the grounds that the event undermined the credibility of the press, and making fun of Donald Rumsfeld, the former, largely unlamented secretary of defence and chief architect of the disastrous Iraq war effort.

Not everyone loved his performance - it was, to reiterate, a tough crowd. Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post took him to task because he wasn't more acerbic about the powerful men and women he was addressing, and interpreted his self-deprecation as a form of advance apology for chickening out. (Two years ago, incidentally, The Washington Post took Stephen Colbert to task for the exact opposite, saying he had essentially violated the unwritten rules of etiquette with his withering take on Bush et al.)

The New York Times has been silent as the grave, following his line that the paper was full of "sanctimonious, whining jerks". The Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals - both instances of the Times failing spectacularly in its basic public duties, as the paper itself has acknowledged - did far more to undermine the credibility of the press, Ferguson suggested, than anything that could possibly happen at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.