Fox News Is Canceling Russell Brand’s Comedy
Don’t get Greg Gutfeld wrong. He’s certainly not trying to cancel Russell Brand. In fact, in an op-ed love letter today on the Fox News website, Gutfeld practically builds a truth shrine in Brand’s image. “I’ve been a fan of Brand for decades,” he gushes. “Even at the start of his career, he was a brilliant brain in search of food at a time when the shelves were bare.”
Gutfeld lauds Brand for walking away from fame and notoriety (though to be fair, it’s been a minute since the comic has had a prominent role in much of anything), opting instead for the brave choice of hosting a podcast. But no longer starring in movies and television doesn’t mean Brand is “a victim of cancel culture. No, it's the opposite. They didn’t cancel him. He canceled them, and no one does that ever. He dumped stardom. So who was the side piece he couldn’t resist? Something called truth.”
Gutfeld and Brand, who was a guest on the Fox late-night talker this week, have a lot in common — or at least a shared hatred of MSNBC. But the two lovebirds weren’t always on cloud nine. Back in the day, the two were downright adversarial. Gutfeld himself produces the receipts, remembering a diatribe he leveled at Brand back in 2014: “You know, it’s bad when a left-wing commie scum named Russell Brand actually weighs in. While Russell Brand is lecturing the United States on bigotry, the deadliest form of bigotry, radical Islam, is spewing from his homeland, but he’s too much of a coward to actually focus on that. He should talk about what’s going on in his home and not in ours.”
Brand didn’t hold back in his response the next day: “Greg Gutfeld vibrates as a human being in hatred. Greg’s a bit of a swine and a bit of a snipe. You’re a silly sausage. You’re stealing oxygen, and you’re wasting time. Your name, your weird facial orifice looks like a caving-in anus, and most importantly, your views, your espousing of hatred, your emptiness, you’re the echoing tub of your mind.”
But now the comic and the face-anus are on the same team, united by their hatred of cancel culture and the big media giants who are conspiring to silence them (and Joe Rogan and Bill Maher and Tucker Carlson). “I’ve been on that MSNBC, mate,” Gutfeld quotes Brand as saying. “It was propagandist. It’s nut crackery.”
So much big media is shutting down Russell Brand’s truth. Unfortunately, according to Gutfeld, that includes Fox News? When extolling the virtues of Brand’s comedy, Gutfeld raves that his fandom goes all the way back to the days of Brand’s talk show, Big Brother’s Big Mouth. The comedy was so good, Gutfeld wanted to air some highlights on Gutfeld! this week. One problem: “It's a show that was so outrageous, legal wouldn’t even let us show it, which sucks.”
Absolutely. Nothing sucks more than when your own network is the one doing the canceling.
