Greg Gutfeld is one of America’s most beloved political comics and a mainstay of satirical television. From 2007 to 2015, he hosted the irreverent late-night show Red Eye, inviting everyone from politicians to writers to priests to shock-rock stars to discuss the wild wings of contemporary politics. Today, he hosts his own late-night political satire show, Gutfeld!
Why did we invite him on?
Before the radical left took up the mantle, it was the right that had a reputation for humourless scolding. Censorship, moralising and appeals to decency and etiquette. Greg was the antidote, and his wilfully unserious and unpretentious take on current affairs earned him a legion of fans. That has not changed - even today, his eponymous show continues to outperform the likes of Colbert, Fallon, and Kimmel in the ratings.
But Greg’s no longer an island in the mainstream right-of-centre comedy space. With the Rogansphere of Austin comics and the rising popularity of more esoteric outlets like Million Dollar Extreme, the balance has shifted.
Even in those dark years, Greg was popular. We wanted to explore that: how did he manage to weather the storm? And more importantly, now that circumstances have changed, how does he feel about the future of his country?
What did we talk about?
”Remember when they started saying ‘fitness was far-right’ and ‘going to the gym was white supremacist?’ That’s just because we were better looking. Their side makes beauty a product of patriarchy; you take an attractive girl and put her in the woke machine and she comes out terrible. ‘Why would I do my hair to please a guy?’”
Say what you will about our guest, he speaks his mind.
Before we got to the subjects we’d planned to explore with him, we felt it was a golden opportunity to hear his story, seeing as it’s Greg’s first time in the hot seat. As he explains, it’s no short tale.
”I was not an overnight sensation… it was a lot of twists and turns.”
From minute 1, Greg takes us on a wild ride, detailing his start in publishing, getting his first piece of writing published, his role in the ‘abs’ revolution at Men’s Health, how he used darts to craft content, a conflict with Ikea, and getting fired for “an incident involving little people”. Oh, and eating President Reagan’s cold leftovers.
It’s an absurd sequence of events, the sort of which can only happen to a figure like Greg. But it wasn’t without its lessons; Greg elucidates how an early career characterised by trials, tribulations and hare-brained schemes set him up perfectly to work in network TV.
With all that behind him already, Greg was ready for Red Eye.
”Fox got in touch saying they wanted to do an edgy, late-late show … I thought it was a pipe dream, that it would never happen. But when I got there, they told me I was starting on Monday. They asked me who I wanted to have on - I’d never done this before!”
Greg’s introduction to live television was a trial by fire. Days after learning he got the job, he was on the air. Often at 3 o’clock in the morning.
What’s more, Greg wasn’t producing a mere carbon-copy, dime-a-dozen talk show. His was an entirely new kind of political programming: sardonic, sarcastic, surreal, and uncensored. But, in those early days, its legend was far from guaranteed.
”I had no idea what I was doing. For the first five months, it was a sh*tshow. It was just me and my friends and none of us had any experience. I was interviewing Sarah Silverman, the lead singer of GWAR, professional wrestlers… But then something happened…”
What was that?
”We stopped caring about being embarrassed. It’s like stand-up; at first, it’s painful. But eventually, you’ve bombed so many times you no longer care. And then it just gets fun. And then it gets good. All of a sudden it was this subversive thing, and we had this amazing following. There was a lot of sh*t that happened at Red Eye that I thought would get me fired. We were the kids that stayed up and f*cked around while the parents were asleep.”
Ask 100 people to picture a Fox News show, and they’ll each come back with identical answers. A well-kept, snappy-dressed, smarmy host delivering the clean-cut reading of the news. None of them would describe Red Eye, a show better suited to Adult Swim or Comedy Central.
This, Greg admits, was no accident.
”I didn’t become a Republican so I could be more like a Republican. I became a Republican so they would become more like me. They needed to loosen up a little. [Breitbart founder] Andrew Breitbart was the first to say that politics was downstream from culture, and we were lacking that. For too long, we were Dean Wormer, and the left were Animal House. I wanted to flip that. We wanted to be risky, fun, and prove we weren’t scared. It was unusual, but I knew we could change things.”
Looking around today, his plan seems to have worked. It took a while, and it wasn’t won easily, but the right has the culture. For decades, conservative-types were wedgie-magnet squares. Now, they’re the ones having all the fun.
We need not rake it over again for you, but there were several bleak years where the dominant culture was brutally inhospitable to irreverent, edgy comedy. Careers were ended prematurely, and even giants were toppled. All the while, Greg remained steadfast. How come Greg was never cancelled for his crimes against wokeism?
