It takes a strong late-night host to resist doing Charlie Sheen jokes, and that man is Craig Ferguson. He announced earlier this week that he wouldn’t be doing any Sheen-is-crazy humor.
Ferguson has a greater frame of cultural reference than the other hosts, and he reached back to the ancient London hospital that gave us the term “bedlam” — a choice word for the media frenzy surrounding Sheen, but, to Ferguson’s point, an example of a place where mental patients were ridiculed by the public.
As Ferguson noted, you know things are getting serious when a late-night host says such a ripe target probably should be left alone, but that’s the kind of guy Ferguson is… he takes his ridicule elsewhere, to those in control and power, rather than those who are losing control and power.
On the other hand, if you are going to make a Charlie Sheen joke, Ferguson’s friendly rival, Jimmy Fallon, managed to do it in a subtle way. His parody of Sheen doing an ad for a fragrance called Winning was excellent because (a) the impression was dead-on, and (b) although it had punchlines, there was a strong undercurrent of understanding, of capturing just how pathetic Sheen has become.
This was a critique of Sheen humor itself.
Bravo to both men.
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