greg gutfeld

Late night has a new tone in 2025, and Greg Gutfeld is the one setting it, one unpredictable quip at a time. Rewriting the rules and bringing his signature acerbic style to “Gutfeld!” on Fox News, his show is drawing in more than 3 million viewers nightly, making it the most-watched show at the edge of prime time at 10 p.m. Eastern time / 7 p.m. Pacific time, airing over 90 minutes earlier than such hosts as Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon

Stacking up gigs, he’s also the resident wild card on the network’s hit show “The Five,” and he hosts the new reality game show “What Did I Miss?” on Fox Nation, which was just renewed for a second season. Gutfeld isn’t just leaving his mark on the network; he’s reshaping it.

Before he became polarizing to some, and well before his New York Times bestsellers and his night of reminiscing on Jimmy Fallon’s couch, Gutfeld was climbing the editorial ranks at magazines like Men’s Health, Stuff and Maxim. His biggest break came when he landed the very late slot hosting his own Fox News show, “Red Eye,” which would set the stage for his runaway success.

Taking nothing too serious while being surrounded by complete seriousness, and with “Gutfeld!” pulling in some of the strongest ratings on TV, he’s proving that irreverence can be its own kind of relevance. His refusal to put so-called untouchables on a pedestal has everyone taking notice, and like him, loathe him or don’t know what to think about a grown man obsessed with unicorns, there’s no denying that Gutfeld has turned having a good time into a full-time job. And he’s just getting warmed up.

How do you find out you’re No. 1 in the 10 p.m. timeslot ? Is there a cake and a massive check?

It’s more brought to you and then happens over time. I get ratings every single day, so I was able to watch us win. I guess I wasn’t that surprised by it; I just knew that it was going to take time. I thought, yeah, maybe in a couple of years, but it was in like a matter of months.

For old–school fans of “Red Eye,” “Gutfeld!” feels familiar, with the blended panel that’s always down to have a good time. But now everyone gets more comfortable chairs, which is nice too.

I agree. “Gutfeld!” is basically “Red Eye” but for everybody. Red Eye was operating on the assumption that you really had a select group of people awake at 2 or 3 in the morning. It wasn’t trying to be a cultlike pleasure; it just happened to be that way. We did want it to be for everyone, though. Now we have 10 times the viewers and we’re No. 1, so in my mind I’m going, I want the same sensibility, but I don’t want to completely confuse the viewers. I realize that my humor on “Red Eye” was deliberately obtuse in some ways, and not really deliberately. It was just surreal and bizarre, and maybe that won’t fly in prime time or late night, but like “Red Eye,” our show now is as interesting and unpredictable as that show was. And that’s 90% of the fight.

There’s definitely an unpredictability theme going on because “The Five” can get somewhat fiery at times, but not for the reasons one would think.

With “Gutfeld!” and with “The Five,” I really push the concept of teasing, because when I genuinely like somebody, I tease them. When everybody is together teasing each other, it’s a very fun thing and the viewers are in on it. On “Red Eye,” we were all basically roasting each other, and on my show, we’re all making fun of each other, some more than others. On “The Five,” of course, I needle Dana [Perino] and Jesse [Watters], they needle me, I go after Jessica [Tarlov], she makes fun of us all — we all do it, and I think that’s really the secret sauce to the success of “The Five,” “Gutfeld!” and why “Red Eye” was so beloved. You felt like you were with the people. It was like a perverted version of “Friends.”

There really is this vibe that, no matter what gets said, when the camera goes off you’re all knocking back a few together.

Yeah, I think the key is that nothing you say should warrant an apology. Meaning, if I were to insult you, you’re not going to demand an apology from me. When somebody wants an apology for a comment I always ask them, “How would that apology sound? I’m sorry that the jokes I made hurt your feelings?” How insulting is that to that person you’re apologizing to! I’m sorry I hurt your feelings with this insult. It’s like the people that are demanding an apology don’t even see how absolutely insulting it is that they are asking for it.

Some people really write their own headlines. I imagine yours ramped up after you took “The King of Late Night” joke and ran with it?

I’m trying to think where “the king” came from, and I think I have to credit Dave Rubin. I think Rubin was on during the first week of the show and said something like, “You’re going to be the king of late night. You’re going to be No. 1.” I don’t like saying stuff like that because then it’ll just be thrown back in your face, but he was right! Then, of course, I had to put it on my book cover. I don’t even know how that all happened, but putting it on the cover of my book was just, like, this audacious and ridiculous thing, having me on the top like I’m a skyscraper where King Kong swatted down people.

Silly is definitely your lane. What do you think the term “late night” even means anymore? It used to be pretty neutral, and now it’s almost like you better choose a side before you watch this comic make their TV debut!

Yeah, it kind of became defined as maybe a person who wanted to go to bed angry with somebody who wanted to go to bed happy. One thing that I always want to do is not send people to bed enraged. Sure, maybe you’re sad that Biden lost, but we’re going to have so much fun, and this is going to be great! And then Trump wins. This is going to be so much fun, and this is going to be great! So, we’re going to have fun, and things are going to be great no matter who wins or loses. I’m not going to let that impact the time that we have. I think doing a late-night show that makes everyone feel bad is a disservice. I don’t understand that. That’s when you have people switching the channel to come to us. They didn’t even know that we existed until then.

What a shakeup that channel flip caused and, also, it’s pretty monumental because the viewers are staying.

You know, for a long time they couldn’t even mention my name and it was a personal thing for them, but then I think they realized that all I did was point out what was missing. I mean, they gave me the opportunity by not addressing most of the country, and it was there for the taking. There was literally free money on the table, and so I took it, and I showed [mainstream media] that they don’t own the culture. I think it’s not just about late night; it’s about all of culture. It’s the ability to tell people, you aren’t the cool kids at the table anymore. You took people for granted, you insulted everybody else, and we’re the ones now who are having fun.

Seeing you on Fallon also looked like a lot of fun. You could seriously feel your excitement as you told him your drunken story of meeting him. You think he’d ever come on ”Gutfeld!”?

It was fun! It went the way I think we both wanted it to go, which was like an old-school TV segment you would have seen on Carson. Just two people having a fun conversation. I probably talked too much, but I had to tell that drinking story because I’ve been telling that story for years, and the only person I hadn’t told that to was Jimmy. So yeah, we were both happy about it, and it’s good to see two industry people in whatever “supposed rivalry” who genuinely like each other without that other bull—. I haven’t asked him to come on, though. Our show is a little different because if you come on, you’re on for the whole hour. You’re also on with other people so it’s kind of a bigger ask of someone, but the president did do it so…

Jimmy Fallon once grabbed a cigarette out of Greg Gutfeld’s mouth, crinkled it up and tossed it to the ground, hollering at the Fox News personality, “Those things will kill you!” But it sounds like the place where they were hanging out had a shot at killing them too.

The two late-night hosts were both “wasted” about 15 years ago when he and Fallon met for the first time at an illegal Hell’s Kitchen bar run by a mutual friend — one who looked like “a cross between a Viking and a larger Viking,” the “Gutfeld!” host said Thursday night on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

The bar looked “like a place where special-ops forces waterboard terrorists,” he added. “There was no bar … it was a cooler, like the kind you take to a beach.”

“Dude, you’re not making this up,” Fallon said. “I totally know what you’re talking about. … I think I remember bringing beer into the bar and then him charging me for my own beer.”

The men’s magazine editor-turned-satirist recalled that their mutual friend operated that way. “He is very cheap, but if you want someone dead, he’ll do it.”

So he walks into the illegal bar with his buddy Andy Levy after the two had just finished taping something — perhaps “Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld” — and Fallon sees him and then tackles him, he said, “like a giant golden retriever.” Then the NBC host grabs Andy and the two fall to the ground wrestling. So Gutfeld decides it’s a good time to spark up a cigarette.

But Fallon leaps up, rips it out of his mouth and shouts the aforementioned you’re-gonna-die warning. “I go … ‘Dude, I’m not rich. You’re rich,’” Gutfeld said. “Cigarettes are expensive in New York City.”

He said Fallon’s face suddenly changed to one of sadness. “And then you left.”

Five minutes later, the “Saturday Night Live” alumnus came back toting a fresh pack of Parliaments, which he handed to the co-host of “The Five.”

“And I go, ‘That was really sweet. You want me to die.’”

Gutfeld, who was on “The Tonight Show” to promote a new game show he’s hosting, then remembered the group piling into Fallon’s car and tooling around to another bar that was, well, in the same building. “We literally drove from one door to another door … I think you wanted to impress that you had a driver.”

These are the things, apparently, that happen to the rich.

“Yeah!” Fallon said. “We had a nice ride, right?”

A nice ride indeed. Short, but nice. Meanwhile, over on “Gutfeld,” fill-in host Kat Timpf was talking about her erstwhile boss taking two full days off work to get a colonoscopy. Oh, how times have changed.

And the tables have indeed turned quite a bit in the last 15 years: “Gutfeld!,” which airs on Fox News at 7 p.m. local time and 10 p.m. Eastern and riffs on politics and the news of the day, is leading the nighttime chat show pack with — according to LateNighter — 3.289 million viewers in the second quarter and 238,000 in the advertiser-coveted demographic of those ages 18 to 49.

Fallon’s “Tonight Show” drew only 1.19 million viewers in the second quarter with 157,000 in the demo. That trails Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” which has a year to go before cancellation and leads the 11:35 p.m. broadcast pack with 2.42 million viewers and 219,000 in the demo in the second quarter, followed by “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” with 1.77 million viewers and 220,000 in the demo.

There’s a lot of schadenfreude on the right, and even more lamentation on the left, about the cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

Donald Trump leads the schadenfreude caucus. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump crowed on social media. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!” (It is remarkable that a president who campaigned with a vow to end “cancel culture” is so uninhibited in his celebration of cancel culture when it’s on his terms.)

The lamentations from the left are just as exuberant, from the other direction. They hail Colbert as a heroic martyr for free expression and speaking truth to power. “Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country’s leader on TV without repercussions,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes declared.

In a sense, both sides essentially agree that Colbert was canceled because of his politics. The argument from the left is that this was unfair and even illegitimate. The illegitimate claim rests on the fact that CBS’s parent company Paramount has been trying to curry favor with the administration to gain approval for the sale of the network to Skydance Media. Shari Redstone, Paramount’s owner, approved a settlement of Trump’s dubious lawsuit against “60 Minutes” (which Colbert had criticized days earlier as a “big fat bribe”). Colbert’s scalp was a sweetener, critics claim.

I think that theory is plausible, given the timing of the decision and the way it was announced. If this was the plan all along, why not announce the decision at the 2025 upfronts and sell ads in tandem with the wind-down? That’s the way this sort of thing has been done in the past.

But Colbert’s critics on the right have an equally plausible point. Colbert made the show very political and partisan, indulging his Trump “resistance” schtick to the point where he basically cut the potential national audience in half. He leaned heavily on conventionally liberal politicians (tellingly, on the night he announced the news of his cancellation, his first guest was California Sen. Adam Schiff — a man who couldn’t get a laugh if you hit him in the face with a pie).

But both the left-wing and right-wing interpretations have some holes. The theory that this was purely a political move overlooks the fact that CBS didn’t merely fire Colbert, it’s terminating the iconic “Late Show” entirely and giving the airtime back to local affiliates. If they solely wanted to curry favor with Trump, they could have given the show to more Trump-friendly (funnier and popular with the young’ns) comedians such as Shane Gillis or Andrew Schulz. The show was reportedly losing some $40 million a year. Even if they hired someone for a quarter of Colbert’s $15- million salary, it would still be losing money.

On the right, many — Trump included — have pointed to the fact that Greg Gutfeld’s not-quite-late-night Fox show has better ratings than his competitors on the three legacy networks. That’s true, but it’s hardly as if Gutfeld is any less partisan than Colbert, Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon.

It’s also true that the titans of previous eras — Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien — tended to avoid strident partisanship. But the nostalgia-fueled idea that a more mainstream, apolitical host would garner similar audiences again gets the causality backward.

Those hosts were products of a different era, when huge numbers of Americans from across the political spectrum consumed the same cultural products. The hosts, much like news networks and newspapers, had a powerful business incentive to play it down the middle and avoid alienating large swaths of their audiences and advertisers. That era is over, forever.

Now media platforms look to garner small “sticky” audiences they can monetize by giving them exactly what they want. There’s an audience for Colbert, and for Gutfeld, but what makes the roughly 2 million to 3 million nightly viewers who love that stuff tune in makes the other 330 million potential viewers tune in to something else. The “Late Show” model — and budget — simply doesn’t work with those numbers.

Cable news, led by Fox, ushered in political polarization in news consumption, but cable itself fueled the balkanization of popular culture. Streaming and podcast platforms, led by YouTube, are turbocharging that trend to the point where media consumption is now a la carte (artificial intelligence may soon make it nigh upon bespoke).

The late-night model was built around a culture in which there was little else to watch. That culture is never coming back.

X:@JonahDispatch

Turns out Kat Timpf is now one of the people she used to want to throw up on.

Timpf’s transformation was revealed Monday in her return to Fox News’ late-night show “Gutfeld,” where she had a regular co-host seat before going out on maternity leave in February.

That leave included a breast cancer diagnosis that came just 15 hours before she gave birth. Soon after delivery, she had a double mastectomy.

“For you keeping score, Kat had sex, which in getting pregnant cured her cancer, meaning sex cures cancer,” host Greg Gutfeld explained. That said, the show did welcome back its missing libertarian with semi-seriousness.

“We’re super happy Kat’s returned. We missed her dearly. We know the future will still be hard for her. There will be other hurdles, I’m sure, but we have faith in her, as much as I hope she has faith in us, to be here when things get rough or when things get better,” Gutfeld said, “but she still complains. So, please welcome Kat back and congratulate her for kicking out a baby and kicking cancer.”

Timpf quickly laid it all out there about what she’d done on her three-month spring break.

“So, I am boob-free,” said the co-host, who is married since 2021 to former Army Ranger Cameron Friscia. “I am cancer-free as well. So, I’m very, yeah, I’m very excited about it.

“It was, it was a hard thing to go through, and it still is, as you know, you mentioned, I still have reconstruction surgeries ahead. I still have things to go through, tough thing to go through, easy decision to make because, like, I didn’t want to risk my life for some f— 32 As.”

“Been there,” co-host Tyrus joked.

Seriously, Timpf says she loves being a mom, even with the personal drama that accompanied it.

“The whole thing, the way that it happened, it really was truly insane,” she said. “I really had a day between the cancer diagnosis and the labor, and we don’t know for sure what happened. I could have gotten cancer because I was pregnant, and even if I did, he’s still so worth it, because I love him so much. And I know that’s so cheesy, and I know that’s so gross, and I used to hear people say that, and like how I can’t imagine my life without him.

“And I used to want to throw up on them, but now I’m one of those people.”

Tyrus, left, Kat Timpf, Greg Gutfeld, Kennedy and comedian Dave Angelo on Fox News’ late-night show “Gutfeld!”

(Fox News)

“Yeah, you know what?” Gutfeld said. “It’s called a transformational experience where you couldn’t even go back in time and explain to yourself what it’s like.” (He had his own transformational experience slightly before Timpf did: The 60-year-old and wife Elena Moussa welcomed baby girl Mira in December.)

Fill-in host Kennedy, a mother of two, said she was just trying not to cry now that Timpf was back and a mom and healthy, and finally Tyrus got to welcome back his “partner in crime,” saying, “It’s been f— horrible. Thank God you’re back.” He also lobbied for Kennedy to get a permanent chair on “Gutfeld!”

Then he announced he had a surprise for the kiddo he had nicknamed “Big Ben,” thanks to a sonogram picture he saw where the baby was the same length as a wristwatch.

“I have a gift for Big Ben, because every young man starting out in the world needs to have — now, he can’t have it right now, you got to wait, but — he needs to have his own Godzilla,” the comic and former pro wrestler said. “So, this is for Big Ben’s first — this is Big Ben’s first action figure. Not a doll.”

“This ain’t girl stuff. This is an action figure for Big Ben.”

Gutfeld, meanwhile, had already given the gift of advice to Baby Timpf-Friscia. During his monologue, he noted that the little guy “came into the world already a hero, for he saved his mommy’s life.”

“If I were him, I would hold that over her head every chance I get,” Gutfeld said. He specifically suggested the child use it as leverage to get his hands on the car keys before he is legally old enough to drive and possibly to procure some Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

And, because the show has running jokes about the hosts of “The View,” he couldn’t help but compliment Timpf for tackling her cancer, noting she had “tackled it head-on, like Joy Behar shoving aside security at a KFC grand opening.”