Greg Gutfeld's Gutfeld! serves a concentrated dose of Fox News at its most toxic

Variety

Since premiering Monday, Gutfeld's nightly late-night Fox News show has been roasted by comedians as unfunny and for telling the same "you're a racist!" joke three nights in a row. But Gutfeld! fails to work, says Daniel D'Addario, because all the host has at his disposal is cruelty. "It’s hard to imagine Gutfeld!, Fox News’ attempt to enter the late-night wars with a comedy-news hybrid show, accomplishing what these shows do and spreading its message beyond the people who happen to tune in live," says D'Addario. "For one, this show’s tone of acrid nihilism looks ugly in the light of day. Even by the standards of the network it’s on, this is a nasty, unappealing thing, preying on its viewers’ insecurities in a manner that Fox News, elsewhere, makes at least somewhat subtextual. For another, much of the series relies on a shared language of resentments that is most legible to the hardcore Fox viewer." Gutfeld!, D'Addario adds, "lets its host off easy. Rather than engaging with the same issues his counterparts do, Gutfeld proposes an alternative-world slate of issues: To judge by his show, the greatest issue facing American society over the past week was the decision made by Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado. It would be at least interesting to see Gutfeld mount a full-throated denunciation of Biden from a comic perspective, given that Biden appears both broadly popular and uniquely hard for even sympathetic humorists to get a bead on. Instead, the show mainly leaves the President alone, simultaneously leaning on invocations of the dark forces of cancel culture and attempts to cancel Biden’s son Hunter. The show can do its version of wonkery, as in a lengthy diatribe by a panelist about how people with voter IDs are likelier to be independent thinkers and thus should be the only people allowed to vote (really), but it’s easier to skip the amateur political theory and skip right to hatred....Greg Gutfeld wants to position himself as an avatar of the viewers’ rage. What he really is, perhaps, is a stand-in for stasis. The system as it currently exists needs Gutfelds to bring voice to a peculiar American sort of rage, an envious desire to root out anyone getting an advantage, a willingness to indulge in hate and call it free-thinking. Gutfeld! fails as shareable comedy for the same reason it will likely run for as long as its star is willing to stumble through the TelePrompTer: Because it serves as a concentrated dose of Fox News at its most toxic while Gutfeld assures the audience that watching will make them feel better." ALSO: Gutfeld! is based entirely on the same concept as clapter -- it's about flattering its audience's belief.