Fox News Launches Greg Gutfeld As A Weeknight Comedy Alternative From The Right

Fox News recently purchased a billboard¹ on Hollywood Boulevard and local spots during Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert and other late-night shows to promote its new nightly entrant, Greg Gutfeld, with the line, “Cancel culture just got canceled.”

As much as the news channel might be presenting the show as an alternative from the right, Gutfeld’s biggest challenge is the same one that all of the other shows face: being funny, night after night. […]

But it is one thing to add another political voice among Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham or a new iteration of The Five, the popular panel on which Gutfeld appears; it will be another to have the nightly comedy impact of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel Live!, particularly with younger viewers.

“I don’t really think about those shows that much, because anything I could predict, I lose interest in,” Gutfeld said in an interview last week. “So I already kind of know that they share the same assumptions. In a way, they are there to please their peers, and not necessarily the audience, which they cannibalize.”

He’s made those shows occasional targets on the Fox News show he has been hosting on weekends since 2015 and, before that, on the overnight show Red Eye starting in 2007.

Gutfeld said that they are adding a handful of more writers and he plans more taped segments, which could make for a faster pace. The show will have a studio audience, and “more experimentation.” He says that they will get beyond politics into other topics. “It could be looser, because you have five opportunities a week, 25 segments, to try something,” he said. “That’s exciting. That’s where you start chipping away at traditional, conventional assumptions, traditional, conventional talk shows.”

Jon Macks, a comedy writer and political consultant who authored Monologue: What Makes America Laugh Before Bed, said that it would be “interesting to see a late-night show that leans to the right but that does not topple over to the right. But it has to focus on having more of an entertainment edge, being just plain funny.”
“The question to me becomes this: What does this provide that is not already there?” he said. “If it is just political commentary with humor, I don’t know if that’s enough. Is it a funny show with a little politics? That could work.”

www.deadline.com, April 5, 2021

1. large panel for advertising