At three o’clock, Corden walked down a hallway to the set, for rehearsal. Onstage, he stood on his mark—a sticker for West Ham United, his Premier League football club—and ran through the monologue. Afterward, the writers huddled around his desk. Corden tapped his pen, frowning. “I didn’t enjoy a lot of this,” he said, more uncomfortable than annoyed. “That’s my overwhelming feeling.” Winston suggested that a joke about Pelosi’s accusing the President of bribery (“He offered her ten thousand dollars to take it back”) needed a better setup.
“And then I thought this photo of the keg stand is not good,” Corden continued. Winston agreed—besides, they had made a similar joke about Pelosi on a previous episode. The bit was scrapped.
“Now, what about the chicken sandwich?” Winston asked.
“I hated that one,” Corden said.
“So why don’t we lose that chicken story?” Winston said. They kept another drugs-in-strange-places anecdote, about a group of wild boars that had got into a stash of cocaine in Italy. (The graphics team had whipped up an image of a boar in a “Miami Vice” suit.) The writers, undaunted, returned to their stations. “I’m going to have a drink tonight,” Corden said. “Get real fucking loose!”
“God help us,” Winston muttered.
Back in his office, Corden and his staff planned upcoming sketches, including a “Masked Singer” parody with Josh Gad and Adam Lambert. At four-twenty, he changed into his suit and sat in a dressing room, where a stylist applied hair spray. The writers gathered around in a horseshoe, and Corden read the revised monologue. Seeming pleased, he asked the stylist to spritz all the writers with Japanese seawater. Before he got up, Crabbe handed him a sheet of paper and said, “There’s something we’d like to do in Act 6 from the desk.” It was a heartfelt statement about the Santa Clarita shooting, including a dig at “politicians without the moral courage to address gun laws.” Crabbe and Winston had distilled it from discussions they’d had with Corden throughout the day. Corden nodded and handed it back.
In the greenroom, outfitted with a Foosball table and a wall of prizes (including a gold YouTube Creator Award, for exceeding a million subscribers), Corden greeted Johnson, Singh, and the musical guest, the band Sleater-Kinney. Reggie Watts, his bandleader, had not yet arrived; he usually strolls in within ten minutes of showtime. While a warmup guy revved the crowd, Corden stood backstage and reviewed the monologue one last time, and the stylist brushed his lapel. Gronk appeared—all six and a half feet of him—and gave Corden an excited bro handshake. Then, at five o’clock, Corden walked onstage.
The show went smoothly. The Pelosi jokes landed, including a new one about how “Prayerful” sounds like the third track on a Kanye West album. Gronk interpreted an emoji headline about a Malaysian man who had got his penis stuck in a drainpipe. Don Johnson told a story about meeting Mick Jagger at Live Aid. Finally, the lights dimmed, and Corden delivered his Santa Clarita speech to a hushed audience. Back in his office, as he changed into sneakers, I noted that he had just segued from impeachment jokes to a penis emoji headline to a sombre acknowledgment of a school shooting.
“And that’s just Thursday,” Corden said nonchalantly. “What a life, eh?”
Corden grew up just outside High Wycombe, England, which he describes as “a sort of shit bit between London and Oxford.” (Its main attraction is a collection of Windsor chairs.) One evening in December, his father, Malcolm, picked me up at the train station there. A sweet, cue-ball-headed man, he recently retired as a Christian-book salesman, but he still plays clarinet in a Royal Air Force Voluntary Band; that afternoon, he’d performed at a veterans’ home. His own father, Kim Corden, was a big-band leader. Kimberley, Malcolm explained, is a family name—his grandfather was christened just after the British victory in the Siege of Kimberley, during the Second Boer War, in 1900—and extends to his son, James Kimberley Corden.
In Hazlemere, the suburb that the family has lived in since James was six, Malcolm drove me past a supermarket where his son, as a teen-age employee, “tried to purloin some of the goods.” We pulled into the Cordens’ driveway, and Malcolm took his clarinet and music stand from the trunk. In the house, his wife, Margaret, a retired social worker, was resting in an armchair. “Marg’s just had a new left knee,” Malcolm explained. The cream-colored living room was adorned with a small Christmas tree and a miniature manger scene. Malcolm brought me a cup of tea with chocolate-ginger biscuits and mince pie.
Margaret was raised as a member of the Salvation Army, which Malcolm joined when they met. James, born in 1978, was the second of three children, and the church was central to his early life. “On Sundays, everyone you know puts on a uniform, marches through the town, and sings ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ ” Corden recalled. He later grew disillusioned: “The entire church that I went to, from what I can realize now, was full of some of the least Christian people I’ve ever come across in my life.” His parents have since left for the Church of England, despite Margaret’s rank, in the Army, of Young People’s Sergeant-Major.
As a child, Corden was “strong-willed” and “very mischievous,” his mother told me. At his younger sister’s christening, when he was four, he pulled faces while standing at the altar. “I remember turning around and looking back through my legs, and people giggling,” Corden said. “And then going back and sitting down and staring at the back of the person in front of me, thinking, Well, this is boring. Why are we all down here? We should be up there! That was it, really. Then it was just a quest to perform in any way, anywhere I could.”
His parents struggled with money—“Crumbs, we didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together!” Malcolm said—but they enrolled him in an after-school drama program. Malcolm dutifully drove him to professional auditions, but his son, who became chubby in adolescence, was never cast. After one unsuccessful audition, for “The Sound of Music,” Malcolm gently told Corden that he could give up auditioning if he wanted. “I can still hear him now in the car, as we were driving out on the Westway out of London,” Malcolm recalled. “He said, ‘Dad, I can’t. It’s what I’ve got to do.’ ”
When Corden was twelve, the Royal Air Force unexpectedly summoned Malcolm to Bahrain in the first Gulf War, as an auxiliary medic. Corden was distraught. “I just couldn’t fathom it, because my dad was a saxophone player in the R.A.F.,” he said. “He used to play big-band jazz on the QE2, and suddenly he was in army camouflage gear.” Malcolm called home every weekend, but the sound of his voice reduced Corden to tears. “I couldn’t talk to him when he was away. My sisters could.” His father returned after four months, having faced nothing more dangerous than practicing injections on an orange.
At school, Corden became a bawdy class clown. “As soon as I got big, I just thought, Well, I’ll be the biggest target in the room. I’ll be the loudest voice. I will have so much confidence that it will almost be unnerving,” he said. As a teen-ager, he was obsessed with the boy band Take That and formed a series of knockoff groups, with names like Insatiable and Twice Shy (“so we could call our album ‘Once Bitten’ ”). Determined to be an actor, he blew off school, except for drama and English; his last two years, he rarely brought pens to class. When a career counsellor advised him to have a backup plan, he pointed to classmates who were planning to study leisure and tourism and asked, “What are they falling back on?”
