Because the host of “GUTFELD!” on Fox News, Greg Gutfeld keeps viewers laughing together with his nightly monologues and sharp takes on current events. He’s clearly doing something right; averaging about 2.5. million viewers, the show is currently the most-watched late-night show in the US. In an excerpt from his latest book, “The King of Late Night,” out Tuesday, he takes on the smug activism of other late-night TV hosts.
I get asked this query quite a bit from college kids. Other than what hotel I’m staying at, they ask: How do I reply to individuals who outnumber me on campus and trash me for my beliefs?
My answer: Just say “Do you ever wonder why I’d select the harder path? Why would I make it hard on myself? I mean, I could just do what you’re doing. So aren’t you curious as to why I’d make myself less popular slightly than more?”
It’s an issue I posed to my evaporating competition. Do you ever wonder why we aren’t doing you? The reply isn’t as vital as them hearing that query …
True. People in my industry don’t like me. We don’t repeat the accepted platitudes.
Before, you gotta understand, I used to be just harmless. They may pat me on the pinnacle and say “He just doesn’t know any higher.”
But when the winning begins, suddenly they don’t want you around anymore. They’ll marginalize your ideas. They’ll say that you simply was once funny, but not anymore. They don’t need to face you. Possibly because I knew then higher than they did.
They don’t need to should fight for his or her beliefs. Perhaps because they’re less confident in them because the tide changes.
So, we must all agree. Or the cocktail party sucks. What a chickens–t option to undergo life, especially on this industry.
Yet, do you recognize who the true heroes are? The selfless group of virtuous late-night talk show hosts (with one notable exception: me).
I don’t mean the nice, talented late-night hosts of the past, but the present witless activist ones of today who’re all coming together to fight climate change for only one precious night. It’s an ideal example of the pliable lockstep — after they all got here together for “Climate Night” in September 2021 to inform us how super urgent this threat really was.
It was so urgent, they’d to attend until these hosts had enjoyed their entire summers off at beachfront compounds before they did it!
Yeah, the planet is melting, but I’ll get on it after my game of cornhole with Alec Baldwin. Which could prove fatal.
So we’ve gone from Carson’s Carnac and Letterman’s glorious silly pet tricks to those sad sacks of panderers discussing beach erosion happening in front of their secluded seaside estates (say that thrice fast and also you win a back rub).
Obviously, I wasn’t asked to take part in this world-saving event. It’s okay. I understand they don’t want the career’s top talent to outshine everyone and make all of them look bad.
Besides, I already had plans. Paying my bills, ironing my socks, and entertaining America.
You wish to hear something hilarious? When asked why he was participating in Climate Week, Kimmel stated, “I don’t need to die.”
Despite doing it every night during his opening monologue. (Sorry, too easy.)
But he doesn’t need to die. From what, exactly? Choking on your individual tears? Colbert noted it needs to be a couple of night, but he’s too busy lecturing us on hate and other topics. And possibly taking salsa lessons with Chuck Schumer on the Arthur Murray School of Dance in Brooklyn.
I mean, if he really cared, why would he be dancing while kids are dying? By the way in which, I don’t need to die, either. Which is much more prone to occur on the A train, thanks.
Meanwhile, what’s America really concerned about, in response to poll data? Crime, homelessness, untreated mental illness, and drug addiction. Granted, those will not be typical (I feel they could be) topics for comedy, but neither is that this virtue-signaling climate bullshit.
But I guarantee you — I could make all of that funny. They will’t. Because they’ve sold their souls to the humorlessness of wokeism.
Also, those kitchen table topics are only too hard to speak about. They require common sense, mixed with dark humor. You find yourself sounding like your parents, God forbid!
But climate is de facto easy! You’ll be able to be so concerned without really sounding like an old fart. And the so-called consequences are so long run, it guarantees that not one of the people pushing this s–t might be held accountable later. It’s like worrying about an expanding universe or the San Andreas Fault.
But much more, while you’re that wealthy and powerful, you’ll be able to create a life that means that you can shoulder the burdens you happily impose on others. Truck drivers and plumbers are screwed while you ban gas-powered trucks, but you’ll be tremendous in your Tesla, which you rarely drive anyway. (Also the unspoken truth: Electric cars aren’t purchased as replacements, but as side pieces for gas-guzzling cars. The electrical automobile isn’t the one you select for the road trip.)
I let you know, there’s nothing funny a couple of hive mind that’s gone full Greta Thunberg under the guise of comedy.
Meanwhile, CBS just needed to cancel their latest show called The Activist before it even aired. Activists would have competed to advertise various causes, one among them being climate change. That, actually, may need been genuinely funny. Unintentionally.
But what’s that basically sound like? Yeah. Late-night talk show hosts, in spite of everything.
Are in addition they competing in desperate virtue signaling so the wokeaholics don’t come after them?
The sad thing is, it doesn’t work. CBS pulled this show because, you guessed it, it wasn’t woke enough.
Yep, CBS tried to go woke and the net roasters stuck their collective finger right within the CBS eye. That’s the lesson.
This isn’t about helping people in any respect, but protecting your careers from the idle woke, waiting within the wings to pounce.
The show was created not as entertainment but a force field for the network to guard against very lonely people whose method of feat can only be measured in denying yours.
The networks were cynical enough to play into it, and dumb enough to think it will work. I’m glad they got screwed.
The Left at all times eat their very own, eventually. Which could actually explain the brand new norm of fat people on magazine covers.
The Oscars may need been essentially the most visual intersection of the terrified celebrity and sanctimonious rage. Remember how the room greeted Will Smith moments after he won for Best Actor after slapping Chris Rock with no immediate repercussions? That’s the form of hero’s welcome reserved for me entering the steam room at Planet Fitness. But do you think that these people really deserve an apology? That’s one thing Jim Carrey has said in his entire life that I agree with — calling the gang “spineless en masse.” He added, “This can be a really clear indication that we’re not the cool club anymore.”
Bull’s-eye!
And why? Because they froze.
The individuals who pretend to be “activists” about all the appropriate causes . . . froze in a moment when real motion was crucial.
It was an ideal metaphor, in a way. A slap that embodied mask mandates and eighty-seven thousand latest IRS agents. It was brute force, lionized. Smith was seen dancing at an Oscar party, clutching his award prefer it was his bald wife. He didn’t seem too traumatized, and neither did his boastful offspring who talked trash on social media.
Life went on, until it didn’t.
It wasn’t until the subsequent day after they woke up and saw that the woke had deserted him.
Who’s laughing now? The one thing worse than Will Smith is the Oscars typically, which deserved greater than a slap within the face. As they desperately tried to please the woke with their latest criteria for Oscars (by which to qualify you really have to envision the sexuality of your crew members), they forgot the audience, and their very own real, non-virtue-signaling morality.
Possibly that morality is gone. It went out the door with their humorousness and their balls.
It’s a reasonably interesting flip that Jim Carrey, to his credit, saw: the cool kids just get smaller and lamer. Next yr they need to all be sitting in booster seats. They went from the cheerleaders and football players on the cool table to the puniest of cowards, who sold freedom of thought and motion for a sanctimonious straitjacket. And it was made clear that to make it in that industry, you needed to do the identical.
They’re the varsity bully who finally got what was coming to him.
I talked at length to a reasonably famous comedian the opposite day, who explained that within the comedy world there are two varieties of comics: those that have an eye fixed on their audience and those that have an eye fixed on Hollywood.
You already know those who love their audience (Chappelle, Louis C.K., Di Paolo, etc.) and those who hope they’ll land a sitcom, so that they play it super-safe.
It’s a weird flip, to see that the edgy performer now is not any different than a frightened high schooler depending on fitting in slightly than standing out. Possibly they were at all times that way, and it’s change into super obvious as they desperately seek a refuge in an increasingly irrelevant but skittish industry. Meanwhile, true to the flip, the ticket buyer emerges on top, offering a collective thumbs-down to the shitty woke-infested content Hollywood keeps serving as much as individuals who prefer to get their sermons at church.
It’s a joy to observe cowardly virtue signaling disguised as heroic diversity fall flat on its face.
Possibly Hollywood will get up and begin making fun stuff again. But in point of fact, do we actually give a s–t? No. We’re done with movies. In just a few years, we won’t even need the actors — they’ll be done by CGI and AI. Then where on earth will all that sanctimony go? Somewhere in Silicon Valley, I suppose.
As for cable news, I’m reading Axios research that shows all cable viewership is down in prime time in the primary half of the yr, except, after all, for Fox News, which is up a whopping 12 percent. Axios, oddly, lumped us in with an overall decline amongst other networks, perhaps to cover our success.
But it surely’s like lumping Michael Jordan in with the French army. Logically, none of this is sensible.
But one thing does: they suck and we don’t. And there’s a reason why.
Diversification. In the event you’re only about one thing — Trump evil! — what happens when that tool not works for you?
You will have no more in your bag. That’s why CNN nearly destroyed itself, before desperately attempting to steer itself back to some moderate degree of sanity. When a one-trick pony loses its one trick, it fears the glue factory.
But this decline is due to not news exhaustion, but to hoax exhaustion.
The media and the general public have flipped. It’s not the media telling us what’s news, however the reverse.
The general public not buys what the media is selling, understanding that the majority news is manufactured and curated for clicks and profits.
Now that they know that, they dictate the terms. It’s one of the best flip ever.
Excerpted from THE KING OF LATE NIGHT by Greg Gutfeld. Copyright © 2023 by Greg Gutfeld. Reprinted by permission of Threshold Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.