To pass the time, David and Trevor compared hearing aids. One in slacks, one in jeans; one in purple polo shirt, one in purple button-down. Their wives nattered among each other, laughing, leaning in, touching the forearm of the other supportively. The men had already covered some important details: One had worked in insurance; one was in cattle ranching. Now they were talking earpiece specs and swapping tips on where to get the very best deals.
“Costco’s the best,” said one.
“The VA’s got ’em,” said the other.
These were wise men, and they had followed a star, a rising star over the News Corp. building. It had led them into a basement of Fox News headquarters on Sixth Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan. It had just rained outside, and inside, it was extremely humid. Together we all stood beneath fluorescent lighting and waited.
On the wall it said Gutfeld! On the opposite wall it said Gutfeld! On a sandwich board it said Gutfeld!
The men had traveled far. One from the heartland, dead center, between Omaha and Sioux Falls. The other had journeyed from down south, Georgia. Both were from the conservative parts of the country, they assured each other, thank God.
The audience passes said to arrive at 4:45 p.m. but also warned: “More tickets are issued than the studio can hold to ensure each show has a full audience.” The men were not going to take any chances. They had turned up before 4 and installed themselves in a queue. Perhaps a dozen people had arrived even sooner.
They had come to pay homage to a newborn monarch: Greg Gutfeld, the “King of Late Night.”
His rivals vanquished, he hath risen. Just a few weeks prior, CBS had announced that Colbert would soon be canceled, cementing Gutfeld’s grip on the empire. There were grumblings that the move had been made to curry favor with the Trump administration, after CBS had paid the president a $16 million ransom over claims about a 60 Minutes segment that no legal expert found credible.
Soon, Gutfeld would receive another boost, when the Trump administration used the Federal Communications Commission and its relationship with pro-Trump media entity Sinclair to get Kimmel taken off the air after comments about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr said at the time. And just like that, Kimmel was gone, only to be hastily brought back a week later after an outcry.
David and Trevor and the rest of the faithful accrued were hoping to catch a glimpse of the king. They shared gleefully what they had heard, the stuff of legend. The Five—the daytime talk show that Gutfeld also anchors on Fox—taped right around the corner. If they were lucky, he might walk by the column of congregants, going studio to studio.
They knew not to expect too much.
“He won’t shake anybody’s hand; he won’t take any photos,” one man advised.
“He walks right by here and never stops to talk to anyone,” another added.
Still, they hoped.
The Fox News handler checked IDs. The line got longer, but Gutfeld did not appear.
Eventually, the group ingressed into the bowels of the studio. We marched single file past a concession stand and were seated in rows of folding chairs. A TV at the front played The Five, and the petitioners laughed at the jokes about Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. They laughed a little extra when Gutfeld was the jokester. Here he was on TV, but soon we would peek behind the curtain and see him in the flesh.
“Ladies, we know why you’re here,” said the security guard, who would lead us into the studio at last. “Greg is a very sexy man. A very sexy man.
“Ladies, control yourselves,” he added. “Keep your underwears on, all right.”
(In fact, the audience for Gutfeld does skew slightly more female than male.)
We filed into our seats. The email warning was an empty threat: The studio audience, which was not large, was not full. There were vacant seats. There had been vacant seats the night before as well. These are free tickets to see the most popular man in late-night television.
The crowd was lectured extensively about not leaving to go to the bathroom, instructed on how to applaud with requisite enthusiasm, and fluffed with warmup jokes by one of the show’s writers.
Then the guests came on. Gutfeld! is known for its reliance on near-no-name guests. We cheered dutifully for Jamie Lissow, Brooke Goldstein, and Andrew Gruel as if we knew who they were. And then, of course, a standing ovation for the king himself.
Everyone sat, and it began. Gutfeld mounted his gray upholstered throne and looked straight into the camera for his opening monologue.
“A former high-ranking Biden aide claims that Biden was fully capable of executing his presidential duties.” Pause. “Unfortunately, they were in his diaper.” Let there be laughter. And there was laughter.
How to describe the Gutfeld school of comedy? It is crass; it is puerile. There are fat jokes, and especially jokes about fat chicks, to the point of anachronism. Seldom is there a play on words, a turn of phrase, heady subtext, something unexpected. Some of it is so plodding and straightforward it does not scan as comedy at all.
In the throes of an opening-monologue crescendo, Gutfeld called Eric Swalwell, the Democratic U.S. representative from California, a “socially inept dork who hasn’t got his weenie wet since a field trip to the waterslide in seventh grade.” He capped that riff by saying that male Democrats were “an emasculated pocket of limp dicks in search of some spiritual Viagra.” There was no wry, arched eyebrow to this joke, but Gutfeld did literally wrench one eyebrow up as he bore into the camera. And there was some laughter.
What’s the joke, and who is it on? Is there a grand theory of Gutfeld humor? Is he punching down or punching up? Here’s how he explained it recently to the New York Times:
I have this thing called the hierarchy of smears, and that means if you call somebody a fascist who’s going to destroy the world, I can call you anything. … It goes back to that framing: I think you’re wrong; you think I’m evil. And I’m never going to call somebody fat because they’re fat. I’m going to call you fat if you called me Hitler. And the best part about that is it hurts them. It hurts them more than if they were to call me Hitler because they have to look in the mirror every day. I know I’m not Hitler. They know they’re fat.
Confusingly, in this situation, Gutfeld was recalling someone pointing out the simple fact that many of his viewers are fat. They aren’t calling him a fascist. When later pressed about one of these inconsistencies in his approach, he responded: “In your face!”
Maybe he is just punching in any which direction. There is a lot about Gutfeld that is confusing. This is the caesar of the most important, sought-after comedy territory in America. How, is one question that arises. Also, why.
Gutfeld himself, 61, is exactly on the Gen X–boomer cusp. But Gutfeld is No. 1 in the “adults 25 to 54” demographic. For Fox News, which is boomer terrain, this is a youth movement. And this may be the last demographic of dutiful, old-school TV watchers for whom the cord was never cut. But even that doesn’t quite explain it, given that the jokes seem as if they were written for 10-year-olds with early-aughts cultural fluency. That day, Gutfeld hit a joke about “the fart heard ’round the world.”
As it happens, this was not my first encounter with the king. In January 2023, I sat in the rafters to see Gutfeld keynote a confab for the National Automobile Dealers Association, a core Republican constituency. Even in Texas, it did not go over well. The tone was the same, but the performance full of duds, the reception tepid at best. Outside his Fox News bubble, even the rich Republicans weren’t feeling it. But here and in millions of households a night, he was giving at least some people what they wanted. (Gutfeld declined through Fox to speak to me for this article.)
Back in the studio, the show went to commercial break. A U2 song played loudly over the speakers. “Good song,” said someone behind me. Gutfeld shuffled his producer’s notes and produced a pink vape. He hit it, and hit it, and hit it, and hit it again. He has told reporters he isn’t allowed to vape in his apartment, where he lives with his wife and their 1-year-old. Not so at work, it appears.
Back on air, the guests riffed on a story about ChatGPT recommending that women ask for less money in salary negotiations. Guest Goldstein joked that she had asked ChatGPT, “How much, as a Jewish American–Canadian civil rights attorney, should I be paid to come onto this show? And it turns out a lot more than you are paying me now. Which is absolutely nothing.”
The show went to commercial, and Gutfeld hit the pink vape again.
One important thing to know about Gutfeld is that he’s cheap. According to Variety, he pulls down about $9 million a year, roughly half of what Fallon, Kimmel, and Colbert earn. The no-names he features, it seemed, come for free. This is the magic of cost saving in a media environment where viewership is drying up, where everything is under consideration for merger and acquisition, where everything is being sold for parts.
Fox News remains the most watched cable news channel in America. Its audience is cable’s most loyal; its viewership eats what is put on the plate in front of it. But it, like every cable news channel, is an empire in decline, its viewership down dramatically even over last year. Ad revenue across the entire late-night TV genre plunged from $439 million in 2018 to just $220 million by 2024, per media-analytics firm Guideline. This is the wasteland, the Rust Belt on air. Everyone has packed up and left for YouTube. My name is Gutfeld, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! And fart!
The show wrapped up, and the studio audience left. We didn’t even exit through the gift shop, and as such were given no chance to use our 20-percent-off coupons. I asked to use the restroom and was denied. I did not see David and Trevor again.
Since that night, I have now watched a lot of Gutfeld! I wanted to be thorough. I have seen jokes about Eric Swalwell, many, and Jerry Nadler, many more, neither of whom I would call influential Democratic legislators. I have heard many more riffs on farts and on fat chicks. (“Fart him to death!” was one memorable punch line.) I would like to say something nice about Gutfeld!, about Gutfeld, about his unlikely success. I would like to say something that defies expectation. But that, of course, wouldn’t be very Gutfeld of me.
