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A Wild and Uncrazy Guy

Will Ferrell used to apologize for being normal. He knew that comedians were traditionally angst-ridden, misunderstood misfits who survived unhappy childhoods by masking their pain and anger with humor. Comedy was an outlet and a remedy for their rage or melancholy or fear. From Richard Pryor to Woody Allen to Jim Carrey, they all had their demons. “I have no interesting demons,” Ferrell told me on a sunny early-autumn day in Hollywood. He was folded into a low leather chair in his sparsely furnished office at Gary Sanchez Productions. He and his writing partner, Adam McKay, who directed the movie “Talladega Nights,” a Nascar sendup that stars Ferrell and is the most successful comedy of the year, had just moved their operations into this two-story bungalow. A housewarming gift from Ferrell’s agents — a specially commissioned photograph of a group of professional baseball players with their middle fingers extended — was leaning in its frame against an empty bookshelf. Ferrell was, as he often is, wearing loose khaki shorts, a T-shirt and sneakers. He is 6-foot-3 and rangy, with a broad torso, but he is economical in his movements. There’s a stillness about him that is surprising.

“I was never the class clown,” Ferrell said, listing the reasons that he is an unlikely comedian. “I was popular in high school and in college. I was good at sports. I’ve always been a ‘but look, the glass is half-full’ kind of guy. I used to worry that I wasn’t crazy enough to succeed in comedy. Or troubled enough. In the beginning, people were surprised that a seemingly mild-mannered person could bring a script or a character to life.” He paused, suddenly looking a little giddy. “But I’m not above throwing a chair out a window just to see what happens,” he said. “I may not have demons, but I am kind of immune to inhibitions.”

Over the past decade, Ferrell, who is 39, has pioneered a comedic sensibility that is in sync with a prevailing spirit of cheerful mediocrity in America. In all his various incarnations — from the characters he spoofed on “Saturday Night Live,” on which he starred from 1995 to 2002, to the roles he has played in movies like “Old School” (which made $87 million in worldwide box office in 2003), “Anchorman” ($90 million in 2004) and “Talladega Nights” ($162 million so far) — he has perfected a version of the likable, suburban-born-and-bred, not-too-smart guy who likes to hang out with his friends, doesn’t particularly want to grow up (even if he’s married) and is happily oblivious to his own ridiculousness. Ferrell grew up in Irvine, Calif., a middle-class Republican community, and he was in a fraternity at U.S.C. Between the two experiences, he knows his characters and he knows his audience. “I have a love of suburban, lame white people,” Ferrell told me earlier. “I think I know what makes them funny.”

In recent years, comedies have become one of the few cinematic genres that are consistently successful at the box office. In 2003, “Elf,” which starred Ferrell as a Santa’s helper who journeys from the North Pole to Manhattan in search of his father, earned $26.3 million in its second week of release (compared with $16.4 million for the highly anticipated “The Matrix Revolutions”), and the industry took notice. “Elf” went on to make $220 million, and suddenly the studios were looking to invest in low-budget comedies. The success of these comedies and the box-office clout of their stars have allowed Ferrell to branch out. On Friday, “Stranger Than Fiction,” in which Ferrell plays a more restrained version of his usual white-guy persona, opened nationwide. “I was afraid that Will would be crazy because he is a comedian,” Marc Forster, the director of “Stranger Than Fiction,” told me. “But he is so normal that it is surprising.”

Although Ferrell has made a slight departure with “Stranger Than Fiction,” his main interest remains comedies that are rooted in group improvisation. “There are really only two ways to get into comedy: stand-up or improvisational comedy,” explains Judd Apatow, who directed “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and who, like seemingly everyone in Hollywood’s comedy universe, is friends with Ferrell and McKay. “Jim Carrey, Steve Martin, Woody Allen — those guys came out of stand-up, and they have a finely honed, particular personality to their comedy. Will comes out of improv, which means he enjoys playing different characters and collaboration and camaraderie. It also means being funny in the moment. That’s part of the improv tradition: comedy as it’s happening now, without a lot of takes, when it’s still fun. Since 9/11, there’s an anxiety out there in the world, and Will offers another way of seeing. He’s like you, but funnier and without worries.”

At the beginning of his career, Ferrell tried his hand at stand-up but found it too solitary an existence. “I would open my act by singing the theme music from ‘Star Trek,’ ” he recalled, as he sang the music from “Star Trek.” McKay, who was also wearing shorts and is also tall, came into the room. “It’s kind of high notes, and I did it straight,” Ferrell went on. “And then my big funny button on it was ‘I’m able to sing that because I have no testicles.’ ”

McKay laughed. “I didn’t bomb too many times,” Ferrell said, “but I preferred the safety in numbers of theater. As a kid, I played more like a girl than a boy. Traditionally, little girls play in groups and boys play king of the hill. For some reason, I liked to share. I was never the kid who had to be reminded to pass the ball.”

Ferrell and McKay met on “Saturday Night Live,” where McKay was a writer. Initially, McKay said, he underestimated Ferrell. “I thought Will was there to be the straight man in the sketches,” he remembered. “But at the first read-through for our first show, he blew everyone away. We all started writing for him because he could do absolutely everything.” McKay paused. “And everyone was always saying how nice he was. But Will’s really not that nice. He likes to cause trouble. You know, when Will was at U.S.C., he tried to convince his frat that they should turn gay. He told them it would promote brotherhood and that they could save money on beer because there would be no women around to drink it.”

Ferrell laughed. “Half the guys really thought I was serious,” he said, sounding a little jubilant. “They found no humor in the idea whatsoever.”

McKay and Ferrell began writing together at “S.N.L.,” and when McKay left the show and moved to Los Angeles, Ferrell followed. Their writing method still draws on the free-form creativity of their “S.N.L.” past. “Will types and I lie down on the couch,” McKay explained. Ferrell added: “We improvise the themes. That will slowly digress into, Did you read that thing in the paper? We’ve had days where we’re, like, O.K. — last interruption — this is the last time I’ll talk about the Lakers, but what are they doing? We really do an expert job of not being too hard on ourselves if we have a day that we totally blow because we just have to talk about other stuff. Usually, the next day we’ll hit the ground running.”

This is the dream of American men: wear shorts, make millions, goof around with your friends, be hilarious. What’s more, you get to be part of a clique of like-minded comic actors, writers and directors who trade ideas, appraise one another’s work and appear in one another’s films. One of Ferrell and McKay’s first collaborations was “Anchorman,” a movie set in San Diego in the ’70s that revolves around a local TV news anchor and his professional cohort. In one scene, the anchor, Ron Burgundy, and his network-news team are challenged to a rumble by rival newsmen played by, among others, Vince Vaughn, Luke Wilson and Ben Stiller, three of the reigning stars of comedy. So goes the current comedy community, which is close-knit and supportive: Ferrell showed up in a surprise cameo with Owen Wilson and Vaughn in “The Wedding Crashers”; Apatow helped out as a producer on “Anchorman.” “The hardest part about doing this job is you get no sympathy from your wife when you say how hard your day was,” Apatow says. “They know that a writing session is pizza and YouTube and hanging out with your friends. The conventional wisdom is that men want to be funny to get girls, and that’s true. But guys also want to be funny to make their friends laugh. Comedians, especially, enjoy each other’s company. Or at least, this generation does.”

Ferrell and McKay certainly do amuse themselves. When they signed a two-year deal in June with Paramount Vantage to produce relatively low-budget comedies, they announced to Variety that their new venture — Gary Sanchez Productions — was named after an ex-N.F.L. kicker from Paraguay. They said that Sanchez, whom they claimed they met on a cruise, would finance their company. “With Mr. Sanchez’s support and vision, we look forward to a long and productive partnership,” Ferrell informed Variety. “Viva Paraguay!” Ferrell and McKay posed with “Sanchez” for several full-page ads, one of which ran with the following statement from him: “Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are my friends. Do not harm them. Or I will put you in an abandoned refrigerator full of cobras.”

“The quote may have been too much,” McKay said. The reporter from Variety, who wasn’t sure whether Sanchez existed, was apparently not amused. “I told you — Will Ferrell is not nice,” McKay laughed. “He is much more dangerous than he looks. The man is completely fearless.”


In the 2000 presidential election, Ferrell voted for Al Gore. This would not have been especially noteworthy if at the time he hadn’t been impersonating George W. Bush every week on “Saturday Night Live.” His depiction of Bush as an inarticulate, slightly addled frat boy who spoke about “strategery” and about his wish to emerge “victoriant” played no small part in defining the public persona of the real Bush. In one particularly memorable sketch, actors playing Gore and Jeb Bush debated the country’s future while Ferrell, as Bush, the soon-to-be president, stood in the corner of the room playing with a ball of string like a contented cat.

Not long after that sketch, “S.N.L.” ran a prime-time election special, and Bush and Gore themselves visited the studio. “It was that strange sensation when art and life collide,” Lorne Michaels, the producer of “Saturday Night Live,” told me on the phone from his office at NBC. “There were the two candidates making fun of themselves to the actors who were playing them. Will, especially, captured something essential about Bush, and because Will is so likable, I believe, he tilted the election toward Bush. Often, it’s the messenger that makes the material.”

Although Ferrell portrayed Bush as bumbling and not too bright, the impersonation was strangely affectionate, and Bush reportedly loved it. He asked Ferrell to make an appearance with him at the White House Press Corps dinner in 2000, which Ferrell declined. Bush later made a similar request for a charity event held by Barbara Bush. When Ferrell said no a second time, Bush phoned Jeff Zucker, then the head of NBC, and asked him to persuade Ferrell to perform. “He said, ‘You gotta get your guy to do my mom’s charity,’ ” Ferrell recalled, using his Bush accent, over dinner at Kelly and Ping’s, a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. “The idea was that Dana Carvey would imitate the dad and I would be the son. And then the two real people would come up behind us, and we’d go, ‘Oops, sorry!’ That was the whole thing. So George the son called Zucker and I was ... busy. In both cases, I especially did not want to do the inevitable photo op afterwards where we are all holding hands. That would have been a gesture of support.” Ferrell paused. “I’ve actually had people say to me, ‘Thanks a lot for Bush,’ as if I helped him win the election. Luckily, no one has said that in a while. But I can’t help the fact that people in America seem to not mind stupidity.”

Ferrell’s Bush, vapid and likable, was a typical creation. With nearly all the characters he has played — Ron Burgundy (a vapid, likable news anchor), Frank the Tank (the vapid, likable would-be frat guy in “Old School”) — Ferrell shows little interest in searching out a dark side. His niceness and his affection for the lameness of these men redeems their many failings and always makes them somehow attractive. Which is not to say there isn’t a subversive element at times. In “Talladega Nights,” which he wrote with McKay, Ferrell plays a Nascar driver named Ricky Bobby, a version of his Bush character, and he uses the character’s likability to soften what would otherwise be pointed satire. In the film, Ricky Bobby is challenged by Jean Girard, a gay French Formula One driver played by Sacha Baron Cohen. Girard reads “The Stranger,” by Albert Camus, and drinks espresso while he drives, and when he trounces Ricky Bobby on the track, Ricky Bobby begins to unravel. At the end of the movie, a rejuvenated Ricky Bobby wins the big race, and he and Girard have a long kiss to celebrate. “The kiss goes on and on,” Ferrell said, as his stir-fry chicken and vegetables arrived. “Adam and I just thought it was funny.” Ferrell took a bite. “It still makes me laugh that at press junkets for the movie, the reporters all say, ‘Let’s talk about that on-screen kiss!’ I play along and say we rehearsed for three months. But really I feel like saying, ‘What’s the big deal?’ ” He smiled. “I do go in and out of Bush sometimes when I’m playing Ricky Bobby,” he continued. “I love the idea of Bush having the big kiss with the French guy.”

In light of the fact that “Talladega Nights” has been a huge hit in many of the states whose voters helped elect Bush and opposed gay marriage, it’s not hard to wonder if Ferrell’s likability might have some effect on the political landscape. Surely it is not a coincidence, Ferrell speculated, that Bush himself read “The Stranger” over the summer. “Bush must be taking his signals from cinema,” Ferrell told me a month after “Talladega” came out. “But don’t you think he’s getting on Air Force One and saying to the press corps that travels with him, ‘Well, I gotta get back to my Kah-moo’? And then he’s nodding off to sleep. ‘This is good stuff,’ he’ll say, and meanwhile the book is dogeared at the same Page 23.”

Not that Ferrell seriously sees himself as having a real impact. He shrugs off praise and criticism alike. “Will does not have an ounce of alpha,” Lorne Michaels says. “He’s so normal that you can forget how talented he is. It’s rare for a comedian to be so well adjusted. His height helps. In a Ben Stiller world, he’s unusually tall and big. As a result, Will doesn’t have that need to dominate.”

Ferrell grew up as a typical suburban kid. His father, Lee, played keyboards for the Righteous Brothers, and his mother, Kay, was a graduate student in English (she now teaches at a community college). When Ferrell was 8, his parent divorced. He recalls cheering up his younger brother: “I was the kid who said, ‘Look at it this way: we’ll have two Christmases now.’ ”

The divorce may be the only cloud in Ferrell’s past. He is close to both of his parents. “Will was always funny,” his father told me. “But he was never one of those kids who are always ‘on.’ It was not like every Thursday night was show night. But in high school, if they wanted to sell T-shirts for whatever fund-raising drive they had, they’d ask Will to make the announcement. He’d get on the school’s P.A., make everyone laugh and they’d sell everything.”

After years of witnessing the instability of his father’s career, Ferrell initially shied away from show business. At U.S.C., he studied to be a sports broadcaster. After graduation, he moved back home with his mother for three years. (“I had no ego about that,” he says now. “It’s kind of sad.”) He took an internship at a local cable access news show in Orange County, and one day he cracked a joke on the air, and it prompted a life-changing epiphany. “I realized I didn’t want to be Jim Lampley,” he says. “I wanted to be Chevy Chase.”

Ferrell had many disastrous day jobs (playing an elf at a shopping mall, failing miserably as a bank teller, losing the keys to the cars he was paid to valet park), while at night he studied acting and performed his stand-up routine. He met his future wife, Viveca, in the summer of 1991 at a theater class at the South Coast Repertory Conservatory. “She was in the good group and I was in the worse group,” he said, as he finished his meal at Kelly and Ping’s. “But the good group just needed guys, and I was tall.” Viveca, who is Swedish, did not pursue acting; she became a fine-arts auctioneer. They are now about to have a second son, and they live in the Hollywood Hills with three dogs.

In 1991, Ferrell began taking classes at the Groundlings, an improv company that is Los Angeles’s answer to Chicago’s Second City. He quickly graduated from taking classes to joining the main company. Like Second City in Chicago, the Groundlings, where future “S.N.L.” stars like Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz and Maya Rudolph all studied and performed, is a pipeline to “S.N.L.” From the start, Ferrell’s persona was the large but otherwise remarkably average-seeming guy who could go really crazy. “I remember seeing Will at an alternative comedy club in L.A.,” Apatow says. “He was wearing a full-body unitard with a hood, and he was imitating a bad magic act in the style of Cirque du Soleil. I was always trying to find out the root of his humor, the great mystery of Will. But after much investigation, I have learned that there is no great story that explains why Will is so funny. Will Ferrell may be the greatest explanation for genes: he was just born funny.”

“Saturday Night Live” called in 1995 and asked Ferrell to audition. He was very nervous. “It was harder, and a bigger break,” he told me, “to get on ‘S.N.L.’ than it was to get into movies.” Ferrell was competing with about 36 people, only 8 of whom were hired. He chose three bits for his audition: Senator Ted Kennedy doing stand-up (“God, this is dated, I thought”); the Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Caray at a play reading; and an angry parent yelling at his kids to get off the shed.

He passed the first audition and was asked to meet with Lorne Michaels at his office. “I had this idea that I would bring an attaché case full of fake money to his office,” Ferrell recalled. “I’d say, ‘We can talk all day long, but what really talks is money.’ And then I was going to leave.” But when Ferrell walked in with the briefcase, he found it too awkward to take out the cash. So he sat with the briefcase at his side. At his next meeting with Michaels, Ferrell brought the money and the briefcase again. “He told me I was hired and to put the briefcase down,” Ferrell said. “I ended up giving around $10,000 to his assistant in fake money.”

In his first show, Ferrell performed a sketch as the “get off the shed” guy — the first in a long series of Ferrell’s even-tempered men who violently erupt and yet somehow remain affable. “It was goofy and light,” Michaels recalled. “Will was part of the new breed of comedians who grew up watching ‘S.N.L.’ For them, comedy is a legitimate career choice. When I got into it 40 years ago, this was a disreputable profession. It was uncharted, and your parents did not approve. Comedy was an act of rebellion. Now that anger has pretty much evaporated. Parents are proud if their kid is funny. And that creates a different kind of comedy.”

Michaels was quick to point out how versatile Ferrell was on “S.N.L.” — playing everything from a male cheerleader to the “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek to Janet Reno, the U.S. attorney general at the time. In his first season on

“S.N.L.,” Ferrell got bad reviews in the press. “I put one review up on my door,” Ferrell told me as he finished his ice cream. “I remember calling my mom and saying, ‘Well, I’m the only cast member that was mentioned by name in this review, but they called me most obnoxious newcomer.’ ” Ferrell laughed. “I thought: They noticed me! I’m off to a flying start.”

It was a cool September night in Los Angeles, and Ferrell was tucked into a corner of Orso, an Italian restaurant. He was wearing a pair of loose khaki slacks and yet another T-shirt. (“I hang my T-shirts,” he said earlier, “I like to give them equal wear.”) Ferrell had been busy: he’d finished the shooting for a film, “Blades of Glory,” in which he plays a sex-addicted figure skater competing in the Olympics. The day after the shoot was finished, Ferrell flew to Canada for the premiere of his new film, “Stranger Than Fiction,” at the Toronto Film Festival. In “Stranger Than Fiction,” Ferrell plays Harold Crick, an I.R.S. auditor who wakes up one day to hear a woman, played by Emma Thompson, narrating his life story. When she mentions his imminent death, Crick embarks on a quest to find her and save himself.

While “Stranger Than Fiction” is humorous in parts, it also delves into larger existential questions about art and life, comedy and tragedy. “I was crying during the entire movie,” Ferrell said when he returned from the movie’s premiere in Toronto. “It was almost like when you’re crying so hard that you can’t catch your breath. It was like we won the game 48 to nothing, and no one thought we were going to win.”

Ferrell rarely talks about his films this way, but “Stranger Than Fiction” is a departure for him. There’s nothing goofy about his character: he’s orderly and trapped. “It was so freeing to not run around and act like a crazy person,” Ferrell said. “It was so nice to be conversational and talk like a normal human being. I felt like my job on ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ was to play really good defense. Don’t throw the ball out of bounds. If you’re open, take the shot, but otherwise don’t get too fancy.”

At the premiere, he was asked whether “Stranger Than Fiction” was an indication that he was going to stop making his trademark comedies. (“No.”) He was also asked a question that he is asked repeatedly about his film career: What’s with all the nudity? Though Ferrell does not appear in his underwear in “Stranger Than Fiction,” in “Talladega Nights,” for instance, he runs around a racetrack in his underwear twice. “The journalists would ask me, ‘Is it in your contract that you have to be naked or in your underwear for every movie?’ ” Ferrell said, looking frustrated — which is as close as he gets to looking angry. “Sometimes I say that Unicef gets a percentage of the box office if I’m naked.”

Ferrell has been taking his clothes off since “Saturday Night Live.” In one sketch on the show, he rolled up a pair of star-spangled short shorts until they fit him like a thong. While filming a nude running scene in “Old School,” he refused to wear a robe between takes. Even in “Bewitched,” perhaps the most conventional comedy Ferrell has done, his character appears naked.

None of the nude scenes would be funny, of course, if Ferrell were in tiptop shape. “Skinny is not funny,” Ferrell said. “When I take my clothes off, it’s not to show off. It wouldn’t be funny if I was ripped.” He paused. “But now I’m going to pull back on all the nudity. I don’t want to be predictable. The last thing I want to do is think of myself in the third person. Like, this is a Will Ferrell part. Or that’s a Will Ferrell joke. I think that means you won’t see me in my underwear again for at least two years.”

Ferrell’s use of nudity can be a revealing aspect of his comedic perspective. It is always extreme: he isn’t ever just standing around in his underwear; he’s running or twisting or sitting with his feet up on a desk. It’s funny in large part because he adds an element of discomfort. “I like to find the funny thing and then, because you’re already here, go one step beyond it to there,” Ferrell said. “The best way I can describe it is, when I was at ‘S.N.L.’ and a sketch was bombing, human nature would be flop sweat and get off the stage. But I would actually slow down and take more time because I had this perverse thing of, ‘O.K., you don’t like it, I’m going to make you sit through it even longer.’ ” Ferrell looked pleased. “There’s a satisfaction in pushing something as far as it will go and seeing if you can convince an audience. I have ideas like that all the time, things that just strike me as funny. Adam and I talk about me doing an album of terrible songs that we’ve written and singing them really earnestly.” He paused, then smiled. “I could do a tour. Maybe sing a song or two in my underwear.” It was hard to tell if he was joking.

At 4 p.m. on a Saturday in late October, 10 hours after arriving from England, where he had attended the well-received premiere of “Stranger Than Fiction,” Ferrell was in a tiny dressing room on the eighth floor at 30 Rockefeller Center, where “Saturday Night Live” is filmed. His father, Lee, was sitting on a dilapidated sunken couch, and his nearly constant traveling companions, his assistant, Jessica Elbaum, and his publicist, Matthew Labov, were sitting in tall director’s chairs. Ferrell, who was wearing the pants half of a track suit and a long-sleeved T-shirt, looked a little tired. He was there to support John C. Reilly, his co-star in “Talladega Nights.” Reilly was the host of “S.N.L.” that evening, and Ferrell, a close friend, had volunteered to make a cameo appearance. The idea was that Ferrell would interrupt Reilly’s opening monologue — but in character, playing James Lipton, the host of “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” Ferrell’s Lipton, insufferably obsequious, a blowhard extraordinaire, was one of the impersonations that he made famous during his tenure at “S.N.L..”

Ferrell looped a long muffler that he bought at a London soccer game around his neck. He walked down the hall to the stage and took a seat in the audience in the second row on the aisle. Reilly, who was wearing a brown suit, came onstage to applause from a small audience that had gathered for a rehearsal.

“When I was asked to host ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I said yes, of course,” Reilly began. “But I told them, a lot of people know my face, but they don’t know my name.” At that moment, Ferrell rose to his feet and said, in his most pompous baritone: “That is a patent falsehood! You, sir, are a delight!” Reilly then invited Ferrell’s Lipton onstage, and Ferrell proceeded to take out a large stack of blue note cards. Listing all of Reilly’s film credits, Lipton-style — only getting them entirely wrong — Ferrell said, “You were brilliant as Roxie Hart in ‘Chicago.’ ” “No,” Reilly countered. “That character was played by Renée Zellweger.” Ferrell persisted and demanded to hear some of Roxie’s big number from “Chicago.” Reilly relented, and the “S.N.L.” house band played the song “Nowadays,” as he and Ferrell both began to sing. Ferrell sang in character as Lipton — a little too much vibrato, a little too grandiose.

After the sketch, Reilly and Ferrell took a moment to revise some of the stage direction, and then Ferrell went to change into a gray suit and be made up to resemble Lipton for the dress rehearsal. Later, seconds before the 8 p.m. start time for the dress rehearsal, Ferrell was taken to his chair in the second row. When he stood up in character as Lipton, there was a moment of surprise in the audience that quickly gave way to recognition, followed by cries of “It’s Will Ferrell!” After the applause died down, Ferrell went onstage and did the bit.

Afterward, Ferrell wasn’t completely pleased with the performance. He said he felt the sketch was a little flat, a bit tame. He conferred with Reilly and studied his script. For the actual on-air show at 11:30 p.m., Ferrell added some physical comedy. When he mentioned Roxie Hart and “Chicago,” Ferrell asked to speak to Roxie. At that moment, he put his fingers to Reilly’s lips. “Can I talk to Roxie?” he begged. “Is she in there?” Ferrell tried to pry Reilly’s teeth apart, pulling his mouth open. It was invasive, unexpected and very funny.

“Baby steps,” Ferrell said later, when he returned to the dressing room. “You can always make something better, but it’s always baby steps, little by little.” He sat down in a director’s chair. He looked weary. But there was little time to rest. He and McKay were about to start writing their next script, “Step-Brothers,” which will star Ferrell and Reilly. By February, Ferrell plans to have grown his curly hair into an Afro so he’ll be ready to play a ’70s basketball star in a movie about the American Basketball Association. “When I left ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I was off work for three months,” Ferrell said. “That was the longest I haven’t worked in years.” He paused. “I do feel, at heart, that I’m a lazy person who found this thing that I love. Comedy makes me industrious. Without it, I’m just another guy.”

There's one whopper of a reason why Casino Royale is the hippest, highest-octane Bond film in ages, and his name is Daniel Craig. This rugged, jug-eared Brit, whose irregular features improbably radiate a megawatt star charisma, gets the last laugh on the Internet buzz killers who've been ragging on him at craignotbond.com for being blond and blue-eyed and too short (five-eleven) for Bond duty. Not only is Craig, 38, the best Bond since Sean Connery, he's the first of the Bonds (great Scot Connery, one-shot George Lazenby, charmer Roger Moore, stuff-shirt Timothy Dalton and smoothie Pierce Brosnan) to lose the condescension and take the role seriously.

HERTZBERG:

Interviewing President Bush aboard Air Force One a few days before his second inauguration, a Washington Post reporter noted that American forces in Iraq had neither been welcomed as liberators nor found any of the promised weapons of mass destruction. “The postwar process hasn’t gone as well as some had hoped,” the reporter ventured. “Why hasn’t anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?” The President’s reply—as iconically Bushian as “Bring ’em on”—came to mind last Tuesday night as the big blue waves started rolling in. “Well,” he said back then, “we had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 election.”

Actually, it was more like an impunity moment. “Let me put it to you this way,” Bush had said the day after John Kerry’s concession. “I earned capital in the campaign—political capital—and now I intend to spend it.” And spend it he did. Whatever he had left over after he blew a wad trying to turn Social Security into a bonanza for the financial-services industry was squandered on an unending skein of assurances that the war in Iraq was going fine. By last week, the coffers were empty, and not even the hurried-up sentencing of Saddam Hussein to be hanged by the neck until dead could refill them. The accountability moment had arrived at last.

Americans have had enough, and their disgust with the Administration and its congressional enablers turned out to be so powerful that even the battered, rusty, sound-bit, TV-spotted, Die-bolded old seismograph of an American midterm election was able to register it. Thanks to the computer-aided gerrymandering that is the only truly modern feature of our electoral machinery, the number of seats that changed hands was not particularly high by historical standards. Voters—actual people—are a truer measure of the swing’s magnitude. In 2000, the last time this year’s thirty-three Senate seats were up for grabs, the popular-vote totals in those races, like the popular-vote totals for President, were essentially a tie. Democrats got forty-eight per cent of the vote, Republicans slightly more than forty-seven per cent. This time, in those same thirty-three states, Democrats got fifty-five per cent of the vote, Republicans not quite forty-three per cent. In raw numbers, the national Democratic plurality in the 2000 senatorial races was the same as Al Gore’s: around half a million. This time, despite the inevitably smaller off-year turnout and the fact that there were Senate races in only two-thirds of the states, it was more than seven million.

This election was a crushing rebuke to Bush and his party. The rest is interpretation. Nearly everyone agreed that public anger about the Iraq catastrophe was paramount. To the surprise of much of the political class, exit polls suggested that corruption was almost as formidable a factor, especially among Independents and disaffected Republicans. On the right, some commentators complained that the G.O.P.’s problem was that it hadn’t been conservative enough: too much spending, too much nation-building, too much foot-dragging on abortion and the like. Others took comfort in the hypothesis that, because a number of Tuesday’s new faces are Democrats of a (relatively) conservative stripe, the election was actually a victory for the ideology, if not the party, of George W. Bush. In a blog post titled “All’s Well on the Conservative Front,” Lawrence Kudlow, of National Review, pointed to the “conservative Blue Dog Dems who won a whole bunch of seats” as proof that “Republicans may have lost—but the conservative ascendancy is still alive and well.”

Maybe. Or maybe those Blue Dogs won’t hunt. In truth, the great majority of Capitol Hill’s new Democrats will be what used to be called liberals, and in every case Tuesday’s Republican losers were more conservative than the Democrats who beat them. Moreover, the fate of ballot initiatives around the country suggests that, on balance, the conservative tide may be ebbing. In six states, mostly out West, proposals to raise the minimum wage won easily. Yes, seven ballot measures banning same-sex marriage passed, albeit by smaller margins than has been the pattern; but one, in Arizona, was defeated—the first time that has happened anywhere. Missourians voted to support embryonic-stem-cell research. Californians and Oregonians rejected proposals to require parental notification for young women seeking abortions, and the voters of South Dakota overturned a law, passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor eight months ago, that forbade abortion, including in cases of rape or incest, except when absolutely necessary to save the mother’s life. Rick Santorum, the Senate’s most energetic social conservative, went down to overwhelming defeat—man on dog won’t hunt, either, apparently.

A more persuasive analysis than the all’s-well theory holds that Tuesday’s debacle reveals the limitations of the “mobilize the base” strategy, which Karl Rove devised on behalf of his boss, and which has required the Republican Party to entrust itself entirely to a hard core of taxophobes, Christianists, and dittoheads. Rove’s strategy, this analysis suggests, seemed to work only in 2000 (when Bush came in second at the ballot box) and in 2002 and 2004 (when its weaknesses were masked by fear of terrorism). Traditionally, America’s two big political parties have been loose coalitions, one center-left and one center-right. Rove transformed the Republicans into something resembling a European-style parliamentary party of the right, politically disciplined and ideologically uniform. This year, in response, many on the center-right acted like Europeans, too: they voted not the man (or woman) but the party (Democratic). That sealed the fate of Rhode Island’s popular senator Lincoln Chafee, among other remnants of moderate Republicanism. For the center part of the center-right, there was nowhere to go except to the center part of the center-left.

The day after the election, at a press conference in the East Room of the White House, the curtain rose on Act III of “Oedipus Bush.” On one level, the current President Bush was all crisp decisiveness as he announced the replacement of his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, with Robert Gates, a former C.I.A. director and the president of Texas A. & M. University. Below the surface, but only a little below, something altogether more unsettling was going on. Rumsfeld was one of the first President Bush’s least favorite people; Gates is one of his most trusted confidants. He is also an active member of the Iraq Study Group, which is headed by another of the father’s intimates, James Baker. The group’s report, expected in the New Year, will offer the outlines of a different course in Iraq—an offer the President may be unable to refuse. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld yields to Gates; in the Oval Office, adolescent rebellion gives way to sullen acquiescence.

Bush said some of the right things at his press conference, but he chose his words carelessly. He congratulated the “Democrat leaders” and promised bipartisanship—a goal he is unlikely to advance by referring to his hoped-for new partners by a name calculated solely to annoy them. Impressions are inherently subjective, of course; but he looked like a man who at that moment would much prefer to be commissioner of baseball, the job he longed for in 1993, before falling back on running for governor of Texas. It has been obvious for some time that, as President of the United States, George W. Bush is in very far over his head. He does not know how to use power wisely. He will now have a Democratic Congress to restrain him, and, perhaps, to protect him—and us—from his unfettered impulses. This may not be the Thanksgiving he was looking forward to, but the rest of us have reason to be grateful.