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The Late Night Rise Of "Gutfeld!" Is Telling Us Something. It Isn't Funny, But That Doesn't Matter

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The Late Night Rise Of

Greg Gutfeld; Fox News Channel Stephen Ferdman/Getty Images © Courtesy of Salon Greg Gutfeld; Fox News Channel Stephen Ferdman/Getty Images

Greg Gutfeld proudly preaches that his worldview was shaped by National Lampoon's 1978 Animal Home, a film that Gen Xers and Boomers consider a comedy classic. Check out his Fox News hit "Gutfeld"! and you can see it In his mannerisms, facial expressions, and demeanor, the host combines the deceptive likability and sophistication of Eric "The Otter" Stratton, Delta Tau Chi President Tim Matheson, with the filthy, unkempt soul of John "Bloot" Blutarski. You can expect the show to be proportionally wild and exciting. Not that.

Holding on to this opinion has two characteristics. First, it has to come from a liberal. And second, one gets the wrong impression that Gutfeld saw the film's script or acting as an influence. no Everything is much simpler. Gutfeld believes that "House of Animals" sheds light on the difference between the self-image of progressives and that of conservatives in general. He calls it the Dean Wormer Effect, after the Buzzkill College staffer who tried to stop the Tau Chi Delta from returning home.

Back in the day, Gutfeld said, liberals were liaison boys faced by sympathetic conservative cops. "In every situation, the right has a stick up its ass. While the left has its knuckles in its mouth," he says in his monologue on February 18, 2022. My goal was to flip the script, to reverse the Dean Wormer effect. ... and now it happened: the change. We had fun, they didn't. It drove her crazy, and we shouldn't have lifted a finger. And when we moved... it always got in the way. "

"A little Trump and a lot of waking up will do," Gutfeld concluded. "Donald Trump showed us that we can be just as hateful and funny and passionate as they are and win."

In this statement and in "Gutfeld!" there is something to think about. In general. Critics seeking explanations for the series' success often left some episodes baffled because they were barely present in any recognizable form, despite the humor's subjective nature. to these people.

But let's skip it. A pedantic analysis of classic farce structures, comedy rules, and how Gutfeld fails to meet those standards is pointless, and he doesn't understand what his rebirth means. Besides the obvious, we have to say that "Gutfeld!" It's the only conservative late-night comedy venue in a landscape that favors left-leaning satirists.

Critics, looking for explanations for the show's success, tend to shout "Gutfeld!" Episode in a certain state of confusion.

In terms of viewership, it beats The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But CBS's late-night anchors are vying for an audience that could see Jimmy Fallon on NBC's "Tonight Show" or "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on ABC Gutfeld fans can sympathize with Bill Maher, which explains why CNN began airing HBO's "Overtime" segment after Friday night's show in February.

Generally "Gutfeld!" He is currently succeeding in his mission to quell the anti-left hostility that Fox News' main anchor is firing by mocking individuals or groups he portrays as role models. It could be the "worst mayor ever" Laura Lightfoot, whose looks Gutfeld is happy to destroy when she claims her black lesbian identity was the only reason she was chosen to govern Chicago. ("I bet it lands on your feet," she says. "It's hard not to when you're a size 12 and have a bum's head.")

This was likely a laugh from the Canadian teacher who was suspended for alleged breast implants, who called herself "intersex" and claimed to suffer from a condition known as gigantomy , called a person transgender, accidentally changed their pronouns and added the segment " called Gagoombagate . . : Canada 2023".

And that was the success of "Gutfeld!" tell us. Americans not only exist in their own information ecosystem, but in a different world of comics. One is led by men in tailored suits enjoying the noise of the crowd lulling their devoted fans to sleep by denigrating the heavy headlines and madness of the MAGA movement with simple, slick banter. The other is this guy, Gutfeld and Co., who made big business poking fun at Red Hats while masking the anger of their prime-time peers with famous sweeteners.

Greg Gutfeld © Courtesy of Salon Greg Gutfeld Fox News host Greg Gutfeld speaks during "Gutfeld!" (Omar Vega/Getty Images)

Every "Gutfeld!" The issue is a prime example of the ruthless liberal nonsense that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram challenged hours before the show. Fox pundits can misrepresent the substance of any Bête Noire they plan to attack (which apparently doesn't include a look at Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit ). But Gutfeld goes beyond that and finds a hilarious embodiment of his anger. So Lightfoot isn't just a loser, he's a bastard mistakenly elected by stupid Democrats, when his mentor may actually be "the biggest troll in trolling history," a con artist who is exposing "an insane program" worldwide, where nobody dares to criticize him, let alone support his "dress code without fear of being called transphobic".

Gutfeld remains one of the hosts of "The Five," which overtook "Tucker Carlson" in February to become the most-watched cable series. ("Gutfeld!", now ranked seventh behind "The Ingraham Angle.") Between "The Five" and "Gutfeld!" Fox has laid Dagwood Bumstead's spite and ignorance between soft white layers of pale, insulting humor.

- Gutfield! joined fight night in April 2021 but didn't garner much attention until August 2022 when total viewership surpassed The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, pulling in 2.355 million versus 2.143 million. Fox News' late-night voice also dominated the core demographic of 25- to 54-year-olds, with an average audience of 397,000 viewers for the month, compared to 373,000 for Colbert and NBC's "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" with 372,000 viewers.

2022 and January 2023 "Gutfeld!" is second only to "The Late Show" in total views, still ahead of "The Tonight Show" and "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"

It's confusing to anyone who sees late-night talk show characters and their hosts, or the latest star banging music chairs on "The Daily Show," as the standard of the form. Emerging through established systems, these artists forged their style in clubs and on the improv circuit, and infiltrated the industry.

Gutfeld worked in magazines before joining Fox in the mid-1950s as the host of a 3 o'clock show called "Red Eye," on which he often featured comedians but did little to establish himself as a worthy prankster. However, his constant smile in clips old and new shows his status as Delta's big brother to the world. We who call ourselves Wormers ignore this at our peril.

Trump rallies are a chaotic attempt at awareness, where threats of violence are met with applause.

Sometimes Gutfeld goes like that, but you know, it's funny! — as he did this week when addressing the Department of Energy's "low confidence" assessment that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic likely escaped from a lab. "Do you think it's wrong for me, Kat," he asked regular co-host Kat Timpf, "when I think of all the people who have made fun of us and want to kill her?" Damage - with mockery.

But in general "Gutfeld!" his monologue is mostly silent, save for the odd scream from the guy in the chair and maybe a few squinting eyes from Timpf, who plays Guillermo Gutfeld and looks like Kennedy, albeit a millennial version. The energy builds as Gutfeld opens up opportunities for other groups, usually made up of regulars from Fox or other hosts, as well as the champions of Tire's National Wrestling Alliance. It quickly became clear that neither the one nor the other made sense. I was just, you know, lost.

It's the heart of what Fox News and Trump call conservative comedy, the "have it all" special and little else. And for those who like comedy, it was disgusting. It's not that humor normalizes harmful stereotypes; This also applies to almost all of Fox News' content, making it redundant. Instead, it imagines that plowing audiences with a mythical flow of liberal tears is enough, and confirms the assumption that no conservative comedian is funny, which is dead wrong.

Greg Gutfeld © Courtesy of Greg Gutfeld Salon . Greg Gutfeld in concert in Cedar Park, Texas on October 11, 2020 (Gary Miller/Getty Images)

Perhaps it was inevitable at a time when the variety talk show space was largely defined by Saturday Night Live alumni and the Jon Stewart-era of The Daily Show (and Comedy Central in general, including Kimmel in the mix). . They've all been trained to deal with Trump in some way and get healthy ratings and coverage.

But the 2016 election was the product of a cultural metamorphosis that continued under the Clinton presidency and accelerated under George W. Bush. After 9/11 left-wing comedians have damaged politics and challenged journalistic satisfaction with the perception of these changes. Meanwhile, Fox News has played a major role in pulling the news industry to the right, catering to alienated right-wing news consumers by insisting its competitors were not adhering to conservative principles or telling the whole truth. Its presenters have provided mounds of fodder for the comedy world and fueled the "us versus them" attitude of the right-wing media world.

But it also means Fox viewers are being bombarded with jokes from various networks that they believe have hurt them. The main theme of the conservative sitcom is that the Democrats think Republicans are stupid, illiterate and bigoted. Others package their views on gender politics, queerness, racial injustice (which doesn't exist), ephemeral intellectualism - anything to do with the fantasy of sweet soy-drinking leftists - in the vague amoeba of "awakening". To people who see their political leaders as an extension of their values, Trump's nightly misrepresentation of a decade is an insult. - Gutfield! He is a team player who has what it takes.

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Gutfeld promoted the "animal house" theory throughout his career. He mentioned this during his speech at Freedom Fest 2017 while hosting the weekly breaking news series The Greg Gutfeld Show with co-host The Five. He quoted Dean Wormer in a 2010 interview with Breitbart to promote his book The Bible of Untold Truths.

In the case cited here, he paid tribute to conservative humorist PJ O'Rourke, who died the same week. "My inspiration is PJ," Gutfeld said. "He made it clear that guns are always fun when you're fighting politics."

Gutfeld later admitted that O'Rourke was "definitely not a Trump supporter" and sold his late husband's feelings. But one also wonders what O'Rourke thought about reducing conservative humor to simple, repetitive ugliness, or the idea that humor itself would be seen as artillery aimed at other members of society rather than politicians, that make life difficult. for each.

“The war is not between Republicans and Democrats or conservatives and progressives. Walk between the fearful and the fearful,” O'Rourke wrote in How the Hell Did This Happen? 2016. “People who think they have no control struggle with it. You surround yourself with those who think they are in control."

Thanks to Gutfeld!, the boys are now regularly invited to the fluffy robe party thrown by the worst sorority on campus.

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