The Patriot Post® · Gutfeld Owns Late Night

Fifteen seconds. That’s all the time it took Fox News to toot its own late-night horn to a Super Bowl audience of 113 million viewers. Fifteen seconds.

And it’s a good thing, too: As the director tells Greg Gutfeld, the regally adorned star of the commercial before he can even get a word in edgewise, “These ads are pricey.”

Gutfeld, the Fox News funnyman who burst onto the scene a few years back with a 3 a.m. show called “Red Eye,” has since moved into the 11 p.m. slot with the eponymously named “Gutfeld!” there to compete with the overpriced and undertalented network late-nighters: Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and others.

And — lo and behold — he’s winning.

Gutfeld, in fact, pulled off a rare double last week, dominating the ratings with not only his late-night comedy show but also Fox News’s early evening round-table show, “The Five,” which he cohosts.

As the Washington Examiner reports, “Gutfeld!” was the sixth-most-watched cable news program last Tuesday, drawing 2.2 million total viewers, including 376,000 of them in the key 25-54 age demographic, according to cable news ratings.

Sadly, not sadly, MSNBC notched just 972,000 total viewers during the same hour, while CNN garnered a dismal pathetic hilarious CNN-like 371,000 total viewers.

As for “The Five,” it brought in 3,373,000 total viewers on Tuesday, the most of any cable news show that day. Four other Fox News shows completed the top five: “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Bret Baier’s “Special Report,” and “Hannity.”

Take a gander at the ratings chart here, and you’ll see the plight that is CNN’s. The Most Trusted Name in News typically draws around a third of the audience that Fox News draws in the same time slot. Lefties love to talk about sustainability. So we’ll ask: How is CNN sustainable?

“Gutfeld!” features two regular guests (Kat Timpf, a tiny libertarian who used to write for National Review, and Tyrus, a massive mixed-race former pro wrestler), and two rotating guests — who might come from the entertainment world or from the Fox newsroom, or perhaps from politics, as was the case recently when Mike Pompeo paid the show a visit. He had a book to plug, but he more than held his own.

At first thought, it seems remarkable that a Fox News personality would be clobbering all these big names in the ratings. But then again, maybe not. Late-night comedy, after all, has had a rough go of it in recent years. First there were the big shoes to fill: Carson, then Leno, and even Letterman. Then there was the eight-year-long industry-wide affliction that rendered all of them mute for the entirety of Barack Obama’s presidency. For some reason, after having had a field day with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton before him, none of these comics could find anything funny to say about the guy with the thin skin and the oversized ego whom LA Times columnist David Ehrenstein dubbed “the Magic Negro.”

Finally, of course, there was cancel culture, which has all but annihilated stand-up comedy. Except for the fearless and the politically incorrect, like Dave Chappelle (language warning).

Gutfeld’s schtick is fearless, too. He’s comfortable with everything from the racial to the political, but also from the scatological to the anatomical, as was the case last week when he covered the story of the German ballet director who smeared dog poop in the face of a newspaper critic, or last night when he covered the Canadian male shop teacher with the ginormous prosthetic breasts — a story he dubbed GazoombaGate.

Hey, we said he was funny. We didn’t say he was mature.

Writing about “Gutfeld!” shortly after the show’s launch in early 2021, a mirthless media critic at Variety, a guy named Daniel D'Addario, railed against the show’s “tone of acrid nihilism,” about how it was “a nasty, unappealing thing.”

Who’s laughing now, Danny?

Greg Gutfeld, at least for now, is The King of Late Night. And Jimmy, and the other Jimmy, and Seth, and Stephen, and the rest of the network also-rans can kiss his, er, scepter.