The conservative American talk-show host wiping the floor with liberals

Telegraph

7 days ago

Hollywood is in shock this week after the long-standing chat-based TV institution The Late Show – previously hosted by David Letterman – was axed by its network, CBS. Late-night talk shows, featuring a comedy monologuing host and mainly A-list guests, have been a profitable US TV staple since 1954 thanks to their low cost, high ad revenue and younger audience. The Late Show has long been the biggest late-night money-spinner. But no more.
Rival hosts and fellow liberals Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart have defended Stephen Colbert, the host of The Late Show, and accused CBS of a politically motivated decision – Colbert was a leading Trump basher, and CBS is currently the subject of a sale that needs government approval. But a bigger factor is probably the show's woeful ratings, especially when compared with the only successful late-night talk show of the moment, Gutfeld!, which is part of the Right-leaning Fox News schedule.
Hosted by Greg Gutfeld, prank-happy former editor of Maxim in the UK and peripatetic hack-turned-author-turned-TV presenter, Gutfeld! has 3.3 million viewers on cable-only Fox, way ahead of network television's Colbert's 2.42 million, ABC's Jimmy Kimmel with 1.77 million and NBC's Jimmy Fallon with 1.19 million.
It's true that Gutfeld's show is on earlier than the others, starting at 10pm, and it also lacks the traditional late-night talk show's younger audience, attracting just 365,000 viewers under the age of 54, but it's also the one talk show not at war with Donald Trump. Indeed, it's the one late-night talk show to host the president while he was still a candidate back in September 2024.
Trump's talk-show appearance
Trump was in a surprisingly focussed mood and talked about his two assassination attempts, other talk-show hosts, Kamala Harris and how great it is that he had Elon Musk on the team. Gutfeld's ratings soared to 4.9 million.
The show's format isn't quite like its traditional late-night rivals. Gutfeld doesn't sit behind a desk; instead there are five people trading quips as they sit in a semi-circle. He has no band but two co-hosts – Kat Timpf, a bisexual libertarian journalist and comedian, and Tyrus, aka George Murdoch, a mixed-race former wrestler who doesn't vote in elections.
Gutfeld, 60, describes himself as libertarian, saying he became a conservative by hanging around liberals, and a libertarian by hanging around conservatives. 'The worst part of each of them is the moralising,' he explained in 2009.
And Gutfeld's public morality is incredibly flexible. He was in the news this week for urging conservatives to reclaim the n-word. By which he meant Nazi. He was tired of liberals calling Republicans Nazis so 'we need to learn from the blacks', Gutfeld said on his other Fox show The Five. 'The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word by using it. So, from now on, it's 'What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi? Hey, what's hanging, my Nazi?''
The lad mag scene
This doesn't come out of nowhere. In fact, it might come from the UK's lad mag scene of the early 2000s. After graduating with an English degree from Berkley he worked in US fitness magazines Prevention and Men's Health. He was then fired and British publisher Felix Dennis hired him to edit his gadget mag Stuff. Then 38, he made his name when invited to address a seminar of the American Society of Magazine Editors addressing the topic 'what gives a magazine buzz?'
His first thought, he told the New York Times, was that 'if you need to go to that seminar, you're hopeless.'' His second thought, he said, was dwarfs. So he hired three for the day, gave them cellphones and bags of potato chips and sent them in to disrupt the session by munching loudly and taking calls. This began a three-year campaign to annoy, harass, mock and traumatise editors of rival men's magazines with a self-drawn cartoon the Stuff Summary, but also, from time to time, his bosses.
'I could never quite work that out,' one British journalist who knew him in New York muses. 'We hung out a bit while I was out there and I always got on well with him. He just seemed really nice.'
His misbehaviour earned him promotion and he headed for the UK to take over Maxim. 'We needed to develop a point of difference from the rest of the men's market,' said Bruce Sandell, group publishing director at Dennis at the time. 'Greg is a very creative bloke, someone who understand the men's market and is a bit of a maverick.'
And Sandell was proved right. For most British journalists who worked in men's mags at the time, there were two Gutfelds – the 'mild-mannered pleasant enough character, I had a couple of drinks with him and we were all at a dinner once,' one former editor recalls. and then the Maxim Monster who he ran a calendar of 'heroic' women in the December 2004 issue – Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, Mother Teresa etc – all substituted by nude models in poses meant to bring their famed counterparts to mind. Diana, for instance, was outfitted with a landmine detector and nothing else. He ran 'Fresh Off the Boat,' a pro-immigration regular showing recently arrived young women in their pants.
He also tried to stoke a feud with Dylan Jones, then-editor of upmarket GQ. Gutfeld ran a contest in which readers who found a tiny picture of male genitalia in the magazine were given a number to call that turned out to be Jones's direct line. He also printed Jones's photo in Maxim's worst dressed column. 'I'm not sure Dylan noticed,' one ex-GQ staffer says. 'Certainly no Maxim readers called, and we didn't see the picture. No one read Maxim.'
'He was doing his best to pick fights,' says another upmarket British men's mag editor recalls, 'but it's not that kind of culture over here, I think. His 'pretend to slag off my rivals' schtick is much more suited to America. I guess he didn't twig that taking the p--- out of each other is, for the British, almost a sign of affection.'
Climbing up the ratings
Whilst working in London he met and married Elena Moussa, the picture editor of the Russian version of Maxim – the couple had daughter Mira in December last year – but despite his best efforts Maxim's circulation fell below 200,000 copies a month and his contract was not renewed.
He spent time writing a column for the Huffington Post until Fox hired him to host Red Eye in 2007 – a sort of proto-Gutfeld but with a broader assault strategy, attacking Right, Left and centre. Whilst there he was forced to apologise to the Canadian army for mocking them days after Canadian troops were killed fighting in Afghanistan.
He was given his own show in 2015, the Greg Gutfeld Show, which moved to the Right and gradually clambered up the ratings, boosted by the coast-to-coast time difference that meant it aired at 8pm on the West Coast. Finally, in 2023, he was given the 10pm slot where his more outré behaviour limits his guests.
'If I had Ryan Reynolds or somebody sitting there and we're doing a segment on trans and sports, do you think he's going to tell me what he thinks? F--- no. He's going to be looking for his publicist: 'You said we were promoting a movie. You didn't tell me they were going to ask me about this,'' he told Variety.
It's also reined in a little by Fox's surprisingly tight rules on things like the use of the word 'a--h---' – he was briefly taken off air for using it. As his star rises, so has his salary – he's earning $9m a year, roughly half of what Fallon, Kimmel and Colbert earn.
But as he delighted in pointing out this week, his job is safe. In fact, it seems likely that Gutfeld may end up being the last late night guy standing while all the competition spins out, blaming Trump. And he seems all too aware of this possibility.
'Firing Stephen Colbert, who was paid $20 million a year while his show lost $50 million, wasn't due to economics, it was fascism,' he gloated in his opening Monday monologue. 'Democrats never get that the free market means exactly that – free to fire someone who's stinking up a market. Hell, his desk cost more than my whole staff. And we still keep beating them in the ratings.'