TVSquad

Craig Ferguson is not just a consummate entertainment professional. He's a five armed plate spinner, a punchline deliverer with a Jack Dempsey right cross, a Horatio Alger of guffaws. He puts his whole being into every late night show and comedy performance he does that he could even make an audience laugh if they were in total darkness.

Sound like a bigger tall tale than Pecos Bill taking Amelia Earhart to the homecoming prom? Here's the proof. His Late Late Show suffered a power outage towards the end of Tuesday night's episode and he still stepped in front of the camera with only a flashlight to serve as his comedy spotlight. This convinces me that if a bull suddenly got loose in the studio, Ferguson could use the moment to make the audience laugh until they are gasping for life while teaching the bull English just so he could beat an apology out of it. Chuck Norris never made me laugh, intentionally.

Just got back from a teeny tiny conference room off the main ballroom here at the Langham. CBS decided that they'd have an "informal press conference" with Craig Ferguson in this itty bitty space, even though a fair number of the critics wanted to hear the funny and thoughtful late night host speak. The SRO crowd wasn't disappointed.

The most newsworthy bit that came out of the proceedings? The fact that the Late Late Show host is "mystified" at the fact that NBC is putting Leno at 10:00. Asked if a show like his could play at that hour, he said, "I don't think people are ready for cussing puppets at 10:00."

More funny quotes from Ferguson's press conference are after the jump.

The ratings for The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien have been slipping since he took over, which is to be expected. Possibly less expected is that while he's been dipping, Late Show With David Letterman has seen a slow increase. So much so that last night, David Letterman beat Conan O'Brien in the ratings. That should certainly help Letterman's negotiations for that contract extension to 2012. The real question is how will this ratings battle settle down?

Certainly there's no reason for the Tonight Show camp to panic yet. Letterman stomped Leno for awhile early in Leno's run, when Letterman first jumped to CBS. But Leno is a very different comedian and host than O'Brien. Perhaps too different? The concern isn't so much that O'Brien's numbers are dipping, because the curiosity factor was going to inflate his initial numbers anyway, it's that Letterman's are on the rise. That could be defectors from the Leno era making a move. But should O'Brien even want to bring them back, or should his battle be for new viewers that maybe weren't watching Letterman or Leno.

Comedy talk shows are a vastly underrated wasteland of quality programming, but they're shorter on female eye-candy than the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show.

ABC is hoping to change that by giving comic babe and former Talk Soup slinger Aisha Tyler her own piece of programming.

The network is letting her develop a pilot for a "hybrid" style talk show that incorporates sketch, stand-up and other variety comedy into a fully "wired" show that will communicate with their audience over the Internet's series of complex tubes.

We reported Ed McMahon's "very serious" medical condition a few weeks ago, and it tugged at the strings of our very weak and sodium clogged hearts.

He's a TV legend, so much so that even people who didn't grow up watching The Tonight Show at least know of him and his work. It's been even harder to duplicate. Hank Kingsley was right. Sidekickology is a "dying art."

But a few little factoids popped up around the Internet surrounding McMahon's hospitalization, and it made the news even more tragic and depressing.

And before all of you Craig Ferguson fans yell and scream and throw tomatoes at your computer screen, let me add, I really like Ferguson! His opening monologue is 10 of the best minutes on TV every night.

Having said that, I still miss former Late, Late Show host Craig Kilborn. You know why? I didn't really realize until he was gone that he was doing something truly different on late night television. Sure, he was the irreverent wiseass, but the show also had a clear old school, retro, Rat Pack-ish vibe too. You sensed that in the guests he had (Merv Griffin was a favorite and he even went to parties at his home), the suits he wore, some of the segue music they played, and the references that he made. Even the set was like something out of a 50s or 60s movie.

And his regular bits! The news segment he did at the start of the show was consistently funny (better than SNL's Weekend Update has been in 10 years), and I really, really miss "Five Questions." And I miss Family Guy writer Alec Sulkin's appearances as the chain-smoking guy who came on and said that everything "sucked." And I miss Craig's faux-newspaper interviews backstage, "A Moment For Us," and his Dance, Dance, Dance!