Craig Kilborn
Craig Kilborn is an actor, born 1962.
Kilborn came out of sports television, anchoring ESPN's SportsCenter from 1993 to 1996, in the era when the desk started treating highlights as raw material for comedy. That job is the key to everything after it. The delivery he built there, flat, faintly superior, timed so the joke arrives half a beat later than you expected, is what he carried into every subsequent room.
He was the first host of The Daily Show, from 1996 to 1998, when the programme was a media-mocking magazine rather than a political institution, and then succeeded Tom Snyder on CBS's Late Late Show, running it from 1999 to 2004. Both shows were later redefined by the people who followed him, which is an odd sort of legacy: he built two formats and is remembered for neither. A 2010 attempt at a return, The Kilborn File, got a short trial run on some Fox stations and no more than that.
Film used him for exactly one thing and used it well. He is the handsome man whose confidence is the joke: Mark in Old School, Heath Parker in The Bronze, Baxter in The Shaggy Dog, Jerry in The Benchwarmers. Twice, in Cursed and in Pauly Shore Is Dead, the character is simply called Craig Kilborn, which tells you how legible the persona had become by then. It is a narrow instrument. Nobody in those films is doing that particular smugness better.
Movies (7)
TV (4)
Where to start with Craig Kilborn
The Kilborn era of The Daily Show is the useful starting point, and it will surprise anyone who only knows the show's later shape. This version is about media absurdity rather than politics, and his detachment fits it perfectly.
The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn is where the persona reached its full form, a host visibly amused by having a network job at all. If you want the film work, Old School is the one everybody quotes, and his few scenes are calibrated to be exactly as irritating as the plot needs.
The Bronze is the best film on the list and gives him a genuinely nasty part to play. The Benchwarmers is broad and disposable, and Cursed is a curiosity, a Wes Craven werewolf picture in which he appears under his own name.