This week, Fox News late-night presenter Greg Gutfeld went viral following the cancellation of colleague Tucker Carlson’s program.
Perhaps in an effort to defy his superiors, Gutfeld has made jokes about Tucker Carlson running for president, criticized a colleague for attacking Carlson, and defended Tucker following the release of several videos this week.
Gutfeld, co-host of “The Five” and presenter of “Gutfeld,” defended Tucker Carlson on Tuesday after several video excerpts were leaked and published by the left-leaning organization Media Matters. Several of Carlson’s behind-the-scenes remarks depict him teasing and conversing with guests or staff members before the start of the program.
Gutfeld defended Tucker Carlson on Twitter by comparing Media Matters to high school hall monitors attempting to get him in trouble.
“Apparently everyone understands nonsense banter between segments except for hall monitor failures bitterly chronicling the lives of the far more successful,” Gutfeld tweeted.
apparently everyone understands nonsense banter between segments except for hall monitor failures bitterly chronicling the lives of the far more successful https://t.co/HkwFTgIub6
— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) May 2, 2023
The majority of late-night television programs have gone off the air due to the ongoing writer’s strike, but Gutfeld! has continued to air new, live episodes. “This comes after the WGA called for a strike after talks with studios broke down,” Deadline reported earlier this week.
The outlet added:
All of the other late-night shows including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Daily Show have halted production.
While Gutfeld!, hosted by Greg Gutfeld, has a smaller team than most of the late-night shows and Gutfeld writes his own monologue, he does have some help from the likes of Nick DiPaolo. Tom O’Connor — who has worked with Gutfeld since his Red Eye days — exec produces, Arash Mosaleh is senior producer, and the writing staff includes Joe DeVito and Joe Machi.
Deadline understands that Gutfeld and his team are not WGA members.
Here’s a clip from his Friday night show:
This year, Gutfeld! became the most popular late-night program in its time slot, surpassing other network programming whose presenters are decidedly to the political left.
Nielsen Media Research revealed that his Fox News began averaging 2.1 million viewers through 2022, as reported by the Washington Times.
“The size of that viewing audience bests both NBC’s ‘The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon’ and ABC’s ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ and also consistently trumps such cable rivals as Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show’ and HBO’s ‘Last Week Tonight’ and ‘Real Time With Bill Maher,’” the report said.
Vox, known to be more of a liberal news organization, opined that “The biggest comedy show on late-night right now is not on ABC or NBC or CBS or Fox. It’s not on Comedy Central. It’s certainly not streaming. It’s on Fox News, and its name is ‘Gutfeld!’”
In May of 2022, Gutfeld also attempted to explain his show’s success to Forbes.
“People don’t go to entertainment for homework,” Gutfeld told the outlet. “You don’t pay for homework. And it feels like there’s been this modern kind of woke culture where everything is being informed with a lesson you have to learn — it’s like, I don’t need to be lectured. I didn’t come here to be told how this is oppression and I have to, like, learn about these things. I came to be entertained.”
“If you’ve been watching my stuff, I spend a lot of time talking about media. Because I know the internal flaws of it. The Gutfeld show became successful because it came at exactly the right time.” he said. “People have had it with being told that every institution in your life is somehow oppressor vs. oppressed.”
“My show is deliberately surreal and absurd because I’m absurd. I call it the Dean Wormer effect. Dean Wormer was the bad guy in Animal House and was always kind of the hood ornament of what a Republican was, and everybody else has fun, right? … My goal was always to flip that. So that we’re the people having fun, and the left, Democrats, are the scolds. You see that now, with even Bill Maher saying, my God, my side is humorless and the other side is having fun.”