When Steve Allen died in 2000, it seemed like the tradition of the show-business do-it-all had died with the man who had juggled composing and producing along with talk-show comedy. But TV's Craig Ferguson is the closest thing we've seen to a Hollywood renaissance man since Steverino left us.

Consider this: the former punk-rock drummer for such groups as the Bastards From Hell, the Dreamboys, the Recognitions, and James King and the Lone Wolves””all “hideously unsuccessful” , he admits by phone from his office in L.A.””turned his sights to standup comedy, before he landed the role of Nigel Wick on The Drew Carey Show for seven years. He went on to write, produce, direct, and star in feature films before hosting a popular late-night television talk show on CBS (for which he composed and performs the theme song). And to top it all off, his debut novel (Between the Bridge and the River [Chronicle Books, 2006]) is now in its fifth printing. Need I say more?

The man sounds driven, but he claims otherwise. “I work hard at what I do when I'm doing it,”  he says in his charming Glaswegian accent, “but I don't do it with an eye to what I'm going to do after that.” 

If the idea of going from angry young punker to professional funnyman sounds strange, bear in mind he wasn't just any comedian. Ferguson got his standup start on London's late-'80s alternative scene and gained a name playing a loud-mouthed bigot called Bing Hitler. “Although it sounds now like an odd progression,”  he says of the transformation from musician to comic, “actually then it made sense because it was the same people hanging out in the same nightclubs. Everyone was kind of in the same big drunken mosh pit.” 

He's come a long way since that British underground scene. Ferguson's standup these days is more affable, not to mention more sober, than it used to be. His opening monologue on his Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson is unlike any other of its kind. When he started the gig in 2005, his openings were like all the other talk shows: a series of jokes on the day's news. “It was bog-standard bullshit, reading gags from a TelePrompTer,”  he says. “But I got bored with that and I hated doing it.”  So the 44-year-old Scotsman now just riffs on whatever pops into his head for 12 minutes. There's a lot of pressure coming up with that much original material every night, and he sometimes falls flat, but he wouldn't have it any other way.

“I don't need people to think that everything that comes out of my mouth is the funniest thing that's ever been said by a bunch of crack writers in Hollywood,”  he says. “There's a kind of distance that that creates between the host and the audience, which I don't think you really need.” 

Like so many performers with a background in standup, he just can't leave the live stage behind him. Ferguson, who's playing the River Rock Show Theatre on Friday (June 23), says he continues to do standup because “it's highly addictive....It's like crack. Once you do it, you can't really go back. You gotta get more.” 