The ???.????? ????.???????rumour mill went into overdrive earlier this week when it was announced that slots across the five major late-night show had been booked for a special guest. Was it Rihanna, or Lady Gaga, or Adele, announcing a surprise album drop? Who else could coordinate and lock in slots on Fallon, Kimmel, Corden, Colbert, Meyers, AND Conan all on the same night?
Sorry, Little Monsters, but the bar’s a little lower than we thought: it turned out to be Will Ferrell. Or rather, his alter ego, Ron Burgundy, resplendent in taupe turtleneck and scarf, taking over late night to promote the second season of his podcast.
His strategy for doing so was… being bad at standup, giving freewheeling in-character interviews, and also some light dummy murder.
As Burgundy told Jimmy Fallon, standup has been a “lifelong passion for about a week now”. It’s hard to tell how much of it was actually planned or written. Burgundy dips into standup tropes (muttering “What else, what else” and pacing during segues, shouting out local sports teams and suburbs at length) and generally just exudes a darker, sadder version of that original Anchormanid: an ageing man just self-aware enough to be terrified of his own ever-growing irrelevance and of how little he understands the world, fighting that fear with self-delusion, non-sequiturs, and yelling.
On Jimmy Kimmel Live, he brought out some slightly outdated impressions (“Imagine Jack Nicholson and Jimmy Stewart at the weed dispensary”), and pointed out that buffalo wild wings are not, in fact, buffalo, but chicken.
On The Tonight Show, he went on a punchline-free rant about how Shawn Mendes stole his songs.
...And then alleged to have once gotten into an ass-biting knife fight with Australian icon Kylie Minogue in the studio, because of pheromones or something.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert devoted over 25 minutes to Burgundy. In an extended nine-minute bit, arguably the one where the shitty stand-up schtick is the most successful, he tries out some fire material about trade wars and the beginning of a joke peppered with racial stereotypes.
There's one decent bit in there: Burgundy asserting that the "Ferris Bueller Report" is the biggest story of 2019, and assuring Colbert that his precious dog Baxter is very much still alive, 47 years after the events of the original Anchorman.
He also talks Trump and fake news, aka "handsome white guys who lie right to your face."
Then for his spot on Late Night With Seth Meyers, Burgundy emerged with a nihilistic hipster ventriloquist dummy named JJ, with whom he exchanged some deeply awkward banter that quickly devolved into a nasty argument before an ego-bruised Burgundy lost his temper and violently attacked the pint-size Brooklyn resident in a sequence that crosses over into the disturbing. (Especially by the 4:25 mark, where you can hear some of the audience gasp.)
On The Late Late Show with James Corden, he goes on numerous rants about the things he "hates", from the dentist to Paypal...
...Before making friends with some animals.
And he uses the same joke almost every time he goes to chat to the host: "You invited me over here, so it must have gone well."
Burgundy’s upcoming gigs apparently include Madison Square Garden (opening for Jerry Seinfeld) and San Antonio Pizza Hut.
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