A Late-Night Show for Red America
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The first thing you notice about Gutfeld!, Greg Gutfeld’s ratings-gobbling, Colbert-battling, have-some-of-that-Don-Lemon phenomenon of a late-night political-satirical talk show on Fox News, is the silences. The pockets of dead air. Gutfeld cracks a joke, one of his reliably and knowingly terrible jokes, and you hear not well-fed mirth but crickets, tumbleweeds, a nightclub vacuum: maybe a few reluctant yuks from his guests, maybe a whoop or a groan from some hollow depth beyond the set. It’s as if he’s bombing on his own show.
You notice this, of course, because like me you’re a simpering liberal reared on toothless consensus comedy. We’re used to and , where a one-liner about Ted Cruz’s facial hair will be bathed in eager applause. Clapping as ideology, tier upon tier of it, .
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