“Last time I was around here, certainly nobody was noticing me at all,” McCartney says on the street.īack in the car, he tells Corden a story: during a stressful period in the late sixties, his mother, who had died years before, appeared to him in a dream and comforted him by saying, “Let it be.” He and Corden harmonize on the anthem that resulted. It begins with Corden and McCartney singing along to “Drive My Car,” Corden honking the horn in time with each “Beep beep, beep beep, yeah!” On Penny Lane, they break into “Penny Lane.” McCartney points out personal landmarks through the window: “I used to be in the choir at that church.” They stop at the barbershop that inspired the first verse of “Penny Lane,” where all the people that come and go stop and say hello.

The McCartney edition was filmed in Liverpool. When Cardi B did “Carpool Karaoke,” she and Corden drove to a senior center, and she rapped for a geriatric dance class. Corden acts as a kind of Everyfan, asking his guests softball questions and cajoling them into making wacky pit stops. There’s a democratizing effect to seeing celebrities experience their music the way the average commuter does-belting along to the AM radio, the real world gliding by. “Carpool Karaoke” videos are exuberant and almost guaranteed to go viral.

In a typical sequence, Corden drives a Range Rover through the streets of Los Angeles with a famous musician in the passenger seat, and a dashboard camera captures the two of them singing along to the guest’s hits. CBS’s “The Late Late Show,” which Corden will have hosted for five years this March, was on location in England, where Corden is from, and devised a special edition of “Carpool Karaoke,” the show’s signature feature. When James Corden booked McCartney, in June of the same year, he came up with something much more elaborate. The routine, which has been watched more than four million times on YouTube, is amusing, in the vein of “Candid Camera.” McCartney is used as a sight gag, an animal in a celebrity zoo, with the ordinary folks-themselves on display-gawking from outside the cage. Then, before they could process what they’d seen, the doors would close.

Each time, a camera would catch the elevator full of tourists gasping and screaming like teen-agers in 1964. When the elevator doors opened, they saw a tableau of Fallon and McCartney playing Ping-Pong, or sitting in armchairs, smoking pipes. Tour groups at 30 Rockefeller Plaza were herded into an elevator.

When Jimmy Fallon had this opportunity, in the fall of 2018, the “Tonight Show” came up with a benign prank. Say you host a late-night talk show and you have Paul McCartney as a guest. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

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