The downside of onomatopoeia is displayed on Fox News’ Gutfeld! a show that is exactly as it sounds, a sucker punch in the no-fly zone from a 60-year-old troll that leaves you projectile vomiting Corn Pops onto your flatscreen.
And that’s on a good night.
On the bad ones, Greg Gutfeld bombs his monologue before a handpicked home crowd with shopworn references to Kamala Harris’ drinking, Chris Christie’s weight, Rashida Tlaib’s purported facial hair, and quipping that “many people believe that Kathy Griffin is really Carrot Top with AIDS.” Recently, there was something about Doug Emhoff being dispatched to get a celebrity for a Harris campaign rally and coming back with the “wrong” ugly billionaire: Oprah, not Taylor Swift.
Friends, it is above my pay grade to make idiot jokes make sense.
I can say humor based on mocking physical appearance is truly fifth-place behavior, touching the wall right after a monkey tossing his feces at kids at the zoo. Many of the slurs are recycled straight from Gutfeld’s earlier Fox News show, The Five, which is a panel show of said five but nightly devolves into a contest of which of the two rich white douchebags — Gutfeld or Jesse Watters — has the more punchable pie hole. (I’m guessing Gutfeld still weeps every time he thinks about how it was Watters who got away with admitting on national television he hooked up with his second wife after letting the air out of her car tires.)
Gutfeld! premiered in 2021 and received the following review from Variety’s Daniel D’Addario:
“Gutfeld!” fails as shareable comedy for the same reason it will likely run for as long as its star is willing to stumble through the TelePrompTer: Because it serves as a concentrated dose of Fox News at its most toxic while Gutfeld assures the audience that watching will make them feel better.”
Such prophecy is usually only found in the Old Testament.
Four years later, Gutfeld! is the king of late night in terms of his 3.3 million voters, but it’s like the time David Duke made it to the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial runoff because of a split field and then got smoked in the general election when it became a one-on-one contest between a racist and a different white guy. (The firm of Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers & Stewart total about 7.3 million viewers.)
Most nights, Gutfeld — picture the Grinch singing “You’re a mean one Mr. Grinch” to himself — serves an unhappy meal of grievances that are rarely fact-based. He is joined by a revolving series of misfit toys of the Gen X and millennial variety ranging from 1990s MTV VJ Kennedy to ex-Trump advisor Steve Cortes and, lately, 2024 Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, who lost to Gretchen Whitmer by 10 in a state that Donald Trump won by a point.
There’s a monologue and then the retread, warm-up Hot Pockets versions of current events with everyone’s veneers gleaming as someone like Kennedy — Kennedy! — makes fun of the unfortunate. Inevitably, Gutfeld returns to the old saw that, in this DEI world, everyone, including Zohran Mamdani, wants to be Black.
“I doubt you can find a single person in America pretending to be white to get ahead,” said Gutfeld recently.
It would have been interesting if former professional wrestler Tyrus, a regular panelist, had been there that night. Tyrus is bi-racial and was left to foster care when his parents split up because his white grandfather could not accept his Blackness.
“When I first got to the foster family, I was obsessed with trying to change my skin color so I could go back home,” said Tyrus in 2018. “If I could be white, I could go home.”
A very special Gutfeld! happens when Greg gets into his feelings. Gutfeld has the added challenge of being jockey short, and, when he feels sorry for himself in his oversized chair, he reminds me of tiny Alice in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ classic video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” (Did I resort to comedy based on human appearances? I did! Lie down with dogs and you get fleas — or worse.) On Monday night, he delivered a cri de coeur about the bad guys on the left. The subject was a New York Times essay about an admittedly punchable Obama speechwriter making peace with his unvaxxed/Rogan-listening brother-in-law through the everyman sport of surfing. Gutfeld is having none of it and loops it back to all the meany lefties from the Covid Wars of 2020. He starts bravely like a prep school kid trying to convince his mum that he is over his first breakup and should be allowed to go on the class trip to Six Flags.
“Let’s realize that we’re the fun ones, we’re the smart ones, even if we’re not the credentialed ones, we’re the smart ones, and we’re the ones winning,” says Gutfeld with a constipated snarl. He turns to panelist Dixon, who he has just introduced as the “hottest thing to come out of Detroit since the two-door Pinto,” a joke in the wheelhouse of Fox News’ over-70 demographic.
“I don’t really want an apology, Tudor. I just want them to admit that they were assholes… And now you want to be friends. I’m willing to be friends, but you, at least, you got to admit it.”
The idea of Greg Gutfeld calling someone else an asshole angered the gods so much that Gutfeld! went black. A few minutes later, the feed was re-established and all that remained was an ass print on Gutfeld’s chair. Fox News cut to a commercial for reverse mortgages.
Gutfeld self-styles as a beady-eyed truth teller who will give you the facts and the jokes only he has the courage to tell you. But that is just in his cartoon-villain exterior monologue. In real life, Gutfeld caves to Trump just like all those congressional weenies. (Gutfeld’s prior show, Red Eye, at least had the appeal that he machine gunned the wounded on both sides.) Last week, Gutfeld talked tough about the Epstein file fiasco scrunching his face up and demanding ASAP transparency.
Then he must have gotten the call. Over the weekend, he tweaked his transparency when speaking before the the Children of John Birch’s Corn at Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA gathering. He talked of Trump and nonstop winning. He then threw in a doublespeak move that clearly broke some ankles and minds in the crowd.
“This is a movement that is so transparent that even their cover-ups are transparent,” said Gutfeld. “They’re not even trying. It’s like, everything that you’ve seen is one collective wink. It’s like, dude, yeah, we get it. You know, Epstein. Epstein was probably a honey pot operation, but it’s like a CIA thing, you know, it sucks.”
Totally, dude.
Gutfeld just became an elderly dad, but any hope he moves off the “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke” stance seems unlikely. And why should he? He makes a reported $7 million a year and if his Fox News minders haven’t hosed him down yet, it is unlikely to happen during the Trump Restoration. Tuesday was a good example. Gutfeld was back on The Five talking about “the Blacks” and how they reclaimed the n-word and conservatives should do the same with being called Nazis.
“We need to learn from the Blacks,” said Gutfeld, who a few hours later on his solo show took exactly nine seconds to work in a Stacey Abrams weight joke. “The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word by using it. So, from now on, it’s ‘What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi? Hey, what’s hanging, my Nazi?’”
Fellow scholar Kennedy chimed in.
“Nazi, please!”
Gutfeld didn’t miss a beat.
“Thank God you did a hard ‘i’ there.”
And then Greg Gutfeld laughed.
What an asshole.
Greg Gutfeld Wants to Know Who the Asshole Is
The downside of onomatopoeia is displayed on Fox News’ Gutfeld! a show that is exactly as it sounds, a sucker punch in the no-fly zone from a 60-year-old troll that leaves you projectile vomiting Corn Pops onto your flatscreen.
And that’s on a good night.
On the bad ones, Greg Gutfeld bombs his monologue before a handpicked home crowd with shopworn references to Kamala Harris’ drinking, Chris Christie’s weight, Rashida Tlaib’s purported facial hair, and quipping that “many people believe that Kathy Griffin is really Carrot Top with AIDS.” Recently, there was something about Doug Emhoff being dispatched to get a celebrity for a Harris campaign rally and coming back with the “wrong” ugly billionaire: Oprah, not Taylor Swift.
Friends, it is above my pay grade to make idiot jokes make sense.
I can say humor based on mocking physical appearance is truly fifth-place behavior, touching the wall right after a monkey tossing his feces at kids at the zoo. Many of the slurs are recycled straight from Gutfeld’s earlier Fox News show, The Five, which is a panel show of said five but nightly devolves into a contest of which of the two rich white douchebags — Gutfeld or Jesse Watters — has the more punchable pie hole. (I’m guessing Gutfeld still weeps every time he thinks about how it was Watters who got away with admitting on national television he hooked up with his second wife after letting the air out of her car tires.)
Gutfeld! premiered in 2021 and received the following review from Variety’s Daniel D’Addario:
“Gutfeld!” fails as shareable comedy for the same reason it will likely run for as long as its star is willing to stumble through the TelePrompTer: Because it serves as a concentrated dose of Fox News at its most toxic while Gutfeld assures the audience that watching will make them feel better.”
Such prophecy is usually only found in the Old Testament.
Four years later, Gutfeld! is the king of late night in terms of his 3.3 million voters, but it’s like the time David Duke made it to the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial runoff because of a split field and then got smoked in the general election when it became a one-on-one contest between a racist and a different white guy. (The firm of Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers & Stewart total about 7.3 million viewers.)
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Most nights, Gutfeld — picture the Grinch singing “You’re a mean one Mr. Grinch” to himself — serves an unhappy meal of grievances that are rarely fact-based. He is joined by a revolving series of misfit toys of the Gen X and millennial variety ranging from 1990s MTV VJ Kennedy to ex-Trump advisor Steve Cortes and, lately, 2024 Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, who lost to Gretchen Whitmer by 10 in a state that Donald Trump won by a point.
There’s a monologue and then the retread, warm-up Hot Pockets versions of current events with everyone’s veneers gleaming as someone like Kennedy — Kennedy! — makes fun of the unfortunate. Inevitably, Gutfeld returns to the old saw that, in this DEI world, everyone, including Zohran Mamdani, wants to be Black.
“I doubt you can find a single person in America pretending to be white to get ahead,” said Gutfeld recently.
It would have been interesting if former professional wrestler Tyrus, a regular panelist, had been there that night. Tyrus is bi-racial and was left to foster care when his parents split up because his white grandfather could not accept his Blackness.
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“When I first got to the foster family, I was obsessed with trying to change my skin color so I could go back home,” said Tyrus in 2018. “If I could be white, I could go home.”
A very special Gutfeld! happens when Greg gets into his feelings. Gutfeld has the added challenge of being jockey short, and, when he feels sorry for himself in his oversized chair, he reminds me of tiny Alice in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ classic video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” (Did I resort to comedy based on human appearances? I did! Lie down with dogs and you get fleas — or worse.) On Monday night, he delivered a cri de coeur about the bad guys on the left. The subject was a New York Times essay about an admittedly punchable Obama speechwriter making peace with his unvaxxed/Rogan-listening brother-in-law through the everyman sport of surfing. Gutfeld is having none of it and loops it back to all the meany lefties from the Covid Wars of 2020. He starts bravely like a prep school kid trying to convince his mum that he is over his first breakup and should be allowed to go on the class trip to Six Flags.
“Let’s realize that we’re the fun ones, we’re the smart ones, even if we’re not the credentialed ones, we’re the smart ones, and we’re the ones winning,” says Gutfeld with a constipated snarl. He turns to panelist Dixon, who he has just introduced as the “hottest thing to come out of Detroit since the two-door Pinto,” a joke in the wheelhouse of Fox News’ over-70 demographic.
“I don’t really want an apology, Tudor. I just want them to admit that they were assholes… And now you want to be friends. I’m willing to be friends, but you, at least, you got to admit it.”
The idea of Greg Gutfeld calling someone else an asshole angered the gods so much that Gutfeld! went black. A few minutes later, the feed was re-established and all that remained was an ass print on Gutfeld’s chair. Fox News cut to a commercial for reverse mortgages.
Gutfeld self-styles as a beady-eyed truth teller who will give you the facts and the jokes only he has the courage to tell you. But that is just in his cartoon-villain exterior monologue. In real life, Gutfeld caves to Trump just like all those congressional weenies. (Gutfeld’s prior show, Red Eye, at least had the appeal that he machine gunned the wounded on both sides.) Last week, Gutfeld talked tough about the Epstein file fiasco scrunching his face up and demanding ASAP transparency.
Then he must have gotten the call. Over the weekend, he tweaked his transparency when speaking before the the Children of John Birch’s Corn at Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA gathering. He talked of Trump and nonstop winning. He then threw in a doublespeak move that clearly broke some ankles and minds in the crowd.
“This is a movement that is so transparent that even their cover-ups are transparent,” said Gutfeld. “They’re not even trying. It’s like, everything that you’ve seen is one collective wink. It’s like, dude, yeah, we get it. You know, Epstein. Epstein was probably a honey pot operation, but it’s like a CIA thing, you know, it sucks.”
Totally, dude.
Gutfeld just became an elderly dad, but any hope he moves off the “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke” stance seems unlikely. And why should he? He makes a reported $7 million a year and if his Fox News minders haven’t hosed him down yet, it is unlikely to happen during the Trump Restoration. Tuesday was a good example. Gutfeld was back on The Five talking about “the Blacks” and how they reclaimed the n-word and conservatives should do the same with being called Nazis.
“We need to learn from the Blacks,” said Gutfeld, who a few hours later on his solo show took exactly nine seconds to work in a Stacey Abrams weight joke. “The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word by using it. So, from now on, it’s ‘What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi? Hey, what’s hanging, my Nazi?’”
Fellow scholar Kennedy chimed in.
“Nazi, please!”
Gutfeld didn’t miss a beat.
“Thank God you did a hard ‘i’ there.”
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And then Greg Gutfeld laughed.
What an asshole.
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