“Recreational beliefs...don’t hurt anybody, and they spark a conversation,' Greg Gutfeld of Fox News said — describing the entertainment value of defending the indefensible, within reason. How Fox News managed to beat 'The Tonight Show':
Seen in a monitor, Greg Gutfeld hosts a segment on his late-night show “Gutfeld!”, at Fox News studios in New York on June 13, 2023.
In Gutfeld’s telling, his teacher bit and the reaction it spawned are part of the grand plan that has delivered him to the ratings summit of late night, to the surprise and occasional horror of many former colleagues and industry stalwarts. To their eye, he has completed a baffling march from Fox’s 3 a.m. slot to a nightly forum where consciously hacky jokes about female drivers and Hunter Biden’s addictions garner a larger audience than “The Tonight Show.
Yet as Fox plots its next chapter, executives have placed their non-recreational belief in Gutfeld, elevating his merry trolling and just-kidding-not-really-but-maybe bearing as an institutional voice for the next generation of viewers. For a network long mocked for its geriatric demographics, Gutfeld has helped attract younger fans: Among those 25 to 54, “The Five” and “Gutfeld!” regularly rank as two of the highest-rated hours in cable news.While Colbert has consistently reclaimed the top spot, the Hollywood writers strike has functionally left Gutfeld and his non-guild team as the only game in town, producing a modest audience bump, according to Fox. “And I am for no choices,” he joked recently.
“It takes a healthy dose of arrogance to be a winner,” Gutfeld wrote in Men’s Health’s in 1995. The headline: “Be a jerk.” At a minimum, Gutfeld has positioned himself as perhaps the fullest realization of what today’s Fox is and what tomorrow’s might be, fusing a roguish contrarianism and an instinct for self-promotion with a political media ecosystem constructed to reward both.
He has accused others in late night of failing to adjust as he has and submitting instead to what he sees as an epidemic of left-wing humorlessness. “How long has she been practicing on patients,” he demanded, “telling them that she’s an actual doctor?”Gutfeld always stood out some in eastern Pennsylvania: the metal briefcase, the coastal sarcasm, the weakness for physical comedy.
At his Catholic all-boys high school in San Mateo — where, he has said, his schoolmate Barry Bonds, the future slugger, cheated off him in Spanish class — Gutfeld recalled receiving extra credit for campaigning for the nuclear freeze. After working as an assistant at the conservative American Spectator, Gutfeld wrote for Prevention magazine before spending several years at Men’s Health, in time for the swaggering prime of men’s magazines.He turned out first-person pieces on internet pornography and a nudist singles resort in Jamaica, where Gutfeld took an anthropologist to observe mating rituals.
“And then of course he had ‘your penis,’” said Bill Stump, another colleague. “I just remember Ardie saying, ‘I don’t know why he has to use that word.’” “I don’t think anybody used the phrase ‘own the libs’ at that point,” said Tom McGrath, a former Men’s Health editor, “but I think it was that.” He dialed a casting agent, hired three dwarfs and dispatched them to the conference with cellphones and bags of chips. As panelists held forth on how to command attention, Gutfeld’s small contractors entered in succession, producing a symphony of chip-chomping and phone-talking that befuddled the room and hijacked the summit.
“In every situation there’s that polarity where the Republicans are Dean Wormer in ‘Animal House,’” Gutfeld said, naming the film’s antagonist. And Democrats, he continued, came off as “the fun, Jon Stewart, ‘let’s have a great time and make fun of Dean Wormer.’ And I said that my goal was to flip that.”
Often unmoored from the Washington day-to-day, “Red Eye” resolved at times to subvert cable news itself, once pretending to convene a 16-expert panel to discuss banking reform, only to run out of time after Gutfeld’s introductions.“He’s like America’s latchkey kid, grown up,” said Nick Gillespie, an editor at large at Reason, a libertarian magazine, and a “Red Eye” regular. “You are constantly searching out new things to pass the day when the adults aren’t around.
Inside Fox, plaudits for “Red Eye” could register as backhanded: At least it was popular in Hawaii, executives said, where it aired in prime time. In September 2021, eight months after the Jan. 6 riots, Gutfeld sat across from Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. This refashioned perspective coincided with a growing platform. His move in 2021 to weeknights at 11 reflected a programming creed of Scott, who has preferred to cultivate talent internally rather than cast about for fresher faces unfamiliar to viewers. Installing Gutfeld where an hour of hard news used to be, Scott reasoned that pandemic-weary audiences needed some levity.“Who do they offend?” Gutfeld asked. “The only time Stephen Colbert ruffles feathers is in a pillow fight.
“He was greeted by family and friends,” Gutfeld said into the camera, “who promptly beat him to death.”
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