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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
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Fox News late-night host Greg Gutfeld went viral this week in the wake of colleague Tucker Carlson’s program being taken off the air.
Perhaps in a move to defy his superiors, Gutfeld has joked about Carlson running for president, slammed another colleague for attacking Carlson, and even defended Tucker after several videos leaked this week.
Gutfeld, a co-host of “The Five” and host of his late-night show “Gutfeld,” defended Carlson on Tuesday after several video clips were leaked and published by the leftist group Media Matters. The outlet has shared several of the behind-the-scenes comments from Carlson, which show him joking and having conversations with either guests or staff members before the show began.
Gutfeld took to Twitter to defend Carlson by likening Media Matters to high school hall monitors trying 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
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Meanwhile, the bulk of late-night TV shows have gone dark amid a lingering writer’s strike, but Gutfeld! has remained on the air with fresh, live episodes. “This comes after theWGA called for a writers strikefollowingbreakdown in talks with the studios,” Deadline reported earlier this week.
The outlet added:
All of the other late-night shows includingThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth MeyersandThe Daily Showhave halted production.
WhileGutfeld!,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 hisRed Eyedays — 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 notWGAmembers.
Here’s a clip from his Friday night show:
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Earlier this year, Gutfeld! rose to become the No. 1 late-night show in its time slot, besting the other network offerings whose hosts are decidedly to the left, politically.
His Fox News began averaging 2.1 million viewers through 2022, Nielsen Media Research showed, the Washington Times reported.
“The size of that viewing audience bests both NBC’s ‘The Tonight Show WithJimmy Fallon’ and ABC’s ‘Jimmy KimmelLive’ and also consistently trumps such cable rivals as Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show’ and HBO’s ‘Last Week Tonight’ and ‘Real Time WithBill 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!’”
Gutfeld also took a shot atexplaining his show’s success to Forbes in May of 2022.
“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.”
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