Greg Gutfeld Says He’s the Only Late-Night Host Having Fun

The way Greg Gutfeld sees it, late-night comedy shouldn’t leave people feeling enraged when they go to bed. “I think doing a late-night show that makes everyone feel bad is a disservice,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t understand that. That’s when you have people switching the channel to come to us.”

It’s hard not to picture Gutfeld rubbing his hands together and cackling as he revels in his ratings. While other late-night hosts, from Jimmy Kimmel to Seth Meyers to Stephen Colbert, vent their cultural and political outrage, Gutfeld says it was an obvious move to cater his show to conservatives looking for a good time. Those shows “gave me the opportunity by not addressing most of the country, and it was there for the taking,” he explains. “There was literally free money on the table, and so I took it.”

The Gutfeld! host says he’s just sticking up for the nerds and dweebs who get ignored in the cafeteria, telling Kimmel and Colbert that they’re no longer the cool kids at the table. “You took people for granted,” he explained, “you insulted everybody else, and we’re the ones now who are having fun.’

Fun, fun, fun! Gutfeld says fun is his show’s key differentiator, not politics. “Sure, maybe you’re sad that Biden lost, but we’re going to have so much fun, and this is going to be great!” he enthused. “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.”

Jimmy Fallon gets it, says Gutfeld, who was a recent guest on The Tonight Show. “It was fun!” he claimed, doubling down on the mantra. “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.”

The two have something else in common — they both have fun getting wasted. Fallon had no memory of meeting Gutfeld 15 years earlier, mainly because they were both bombed out of their gourds, Gutfeld told The Tonight Show audience. The two hooked up at an “illegal speakeasy” in Hell’s Kitchen, where a drunken Fallon tackled Guftfeld by way of introduction. The two smoked cigs and hit up more bars that night, including one with a shirtless bartender, corroborating tales of Fallon’s drunken mishaps during his early late-night run. 

Boy, is Gutfeld having fun. “With The Five, I really push the concept of teasing, because when I genuinely like somebody, I tease them,” he said. And you can guess why — “When everybody is together teasing each other, it’s a very fun thing.”

Teasing is the secret ingredient of Gutfeld! and The Five, he says, just like on his old show Red Eye, where funny pals roasted each other without mercy. “It was like a perverted version of Friends.”  

And what could be more fun than that?