Greg Gutfeld writes about ‘sad-sack’ late night peers in book

As the host of “GUTFELD!” on Fox News, Greg Gutfeld keeps viewers laughing with his nightly monologues and sharp takes on current events. He’s clearly doing something right; averaging about 2.5. million viewers, the show is currently the most-watched late-night show in the United States. In an excerpt from his new book, “The King of Late Night,” out Tuesday, he takes on the smug activism of other late-night TV hosts.

I get asked this question a lot from college kids. Aside from what hotel I’m staying at, they ask: How do I respond to people who outnumber me on campus and trash me for my beliefs?

My answer: Just say “Do you ever wonder why I’d choose the harder path? Why would I make it hard on myself? I mean, I could just do what you are doing. So aren’t you curious as to why I would make myself less popular rather than more?”

It’s a question I posed to my evaporating competition. Do you ever wonder why we aren’t doing you? The answer isn’t as important as them hearing that question …

True. People in my industry don’t like me. We don’t repeat the accepted platitudes.

Before, you gotta understand, I was just harmless. They could pat me on the head and say “He just doesn’t know any better.”

But when the winning begins, suddenly they don’t want you around anymore. They’ll marginalize your ideas. They’ll say that you used to be funny, but not anymore. They don’t want to face you. Maybe because I knew then better than they did.

They don’t want to have to fight for their beliefs. Perhaps because they’re less confident in them as the tide changes.

So, we must all agree. Or the cocktail party sucks. What a chickens–t way to go through life, especially in this industry. 

Yet, do you know who the real heroes are? The selfless group of virtuous late-night talk show hosts (with one notable exception: me).

I don’t mean the great, talented late-night hosts of the past, but the current witless activist ones of today who are all coming together to fight climate change for just one precious night. It’s a perfect example of the pliable lockstep — when they all came together for “Climate Night” in September 2021 to tell us how super urgent this threat really was. 

It was so urgent, they had to wait until these hosts had enjoyed their entire summers off at beachfront compounds before they did it!

Yeah, the planet is melting, but I’ll get on it after my game of cornhole with Alec Baldwin. Which could prove fatal.

So we’ve gone from Carson’s Carnac and Letterman’s glorious stupid pet tricks to these sad sacks of panderers discussing beach erosion happening in front of their secluded seaside estates (say that three times fast and you win a back rub).

Obviously, I wasn’t asked to participate in this world-saving event. It’s okay. I understand they don’t want the profession’s top talent to outshine everyone and make them all look bad.

Besides, I already had plans. Paying my bills, ironing my socks, and entertaining America.

You want to hear something hilarious? When asked why he was participating in Climate Week, Kimmel stated, “I don’t want to die.”

Despite doing it every night during his opening monologue. (Sorry, too easy.)

But he doesn’t want to die. From what, exactly? Choking on your own tears? Colbert noted it should be more than one night, but he’s too busy lecturing us on hate and other topics. And maybe taking salsa lessons with Chuck Schumer at the Arthur Murray School of Dance in Brooklyn.

I mean, if he really cared, why would he be dancing while kids are dying? By the way, I don’t want to die, either. Which is far more likely to happen on the A train, thank you.

Meanwhile, what is America really concerned about, according to poll data? Crime, homelessness, untreated mental illness, and drug addiction. Granted, those may not be typical (I think they can be) topics for comedy, but neither is this virtue-signaling climate bullshit.

But I guarantee you — I can make all of that funny. They can’t. Because they’ve sold their souls to the humorlessness of wokeism.

Also, those kitchen table topics are just too hard to talk about. They require common sense, mixed with dark humor. You end up sounding like your parents, God forbid!

But climate is really easy! You can be so concerned without really sounding like an old fart. And the so-called consequences are so long term, it guarantees that none of the people pushing this s–t will be held accountable later. It’s like worrying about an expanding universe or the San Andreas Fault.

But even more, when you’re that wealthy and powerful, you can create a life that allows you to shoulder the burdens you happily impose on others. Truck drivers and plumbers are screwed when you ban gas-powered trucks, but you’ll be fine in your Tesla, which you rarely drive anyway. (Also the unspoken truth: Electric cars aren’t purchased as replacements, but as side pieces for gas-guzzling cars. The electric car isn’t the one you choose for the road trip.)

I tell you, there’s nothing funny about a hive mind that’s gone full Greta Thunberg under the guise of comedy. 

Meanwhile, CBS just had to cancel their new show called The Activist before it even aired. Activists would have competed to promote various causes, one of them being climate change. That, actually, might have been genuinely funny. Unintentionally.

But what’s that really sound like? Yeah. Late-night talk show hosts, after all. 

Are they also competing in desperate virtue signaling so the wokeaholics don’t come after them?

The sad thing is, it doesn’t work. CBS pulled this show because, you guessed it, it wasn’t woke enough.

Yep, CBS tried to go woke and the online roasters stuck their collective finger right in the CBS eye. That’s the lesson. 

This isn’t about helping people at all, but protecting your careers from the idle woke, waiting in the wings to pounce. 

The show was created not as entertainment but a force field for the network to protect against very lonely people whose method of achievement can only be measured in denying yours.

The networks were cynical enough to play into it, and dumb enough to think it would work. I’m glad they got screwed.

The Left always eat their own, eventually. Which might actually explain the new norm of fat people on magazine covers.

The Oscars might have been the most visual intersection of the terrified celebrity and sanctimonious rage. Remember how the room greeted Will Smith moments after he won for Best Actor after slapping Chris Rock with no immediate repercussions? That’s the kind of hero’s welcome reserved for me entering the steam room at Planet Fitness. But do you think these people really deserve an apology? That’s one thing Jim Carrey has said in his entire life that I agree with — calling the crowd “spineless en masse.” He added, “This is a really clear indication that we’re not the cool club anymore.”

Bull’s-eye!

And why? Because they froze. 

The people who pretend to be “activists” about all the right causes . . . froze in a moment when real action was necessary. 

It was a perfect metaphor, in a way. A slap that embodied mask mandates and eighty-seven thousand new IRS agents. It was brute force, lionized. Smith was seen dancing at an Oscar party, clutching his award like it was his bald wife. He didn’t seem too traumatized, and neither did his arrogant offspring who talked trash on social media. 

Life went on, until it didn’t.

It wasn’t until the next day when they woke up and saw that the woke had deserted him. 

Who’s laughing now? The only thing worse than Will Smith is the Oscars in general, which deserved more than a slap in the face. As they desperately tried to please the woke with their new criteria for Oscars (in which to qualify you actually have to check the sexuality of your crew members), they forgot the audience, and their own real, non-virtue-signaling morality. 

Maybe that morality is gone. It went out the door with their sense of humor and their balls. 

It’s a pretty interesting flip that Jim Carrey, to his credit, saw: the cool kids just get smaller and lamer. Next year they should all be sitting in booster seats. They went from the cheerleaders and football players at the cool table to the puniest of cowards, who sold freedom of thought and action for a sanctimonious straitjacket. And it was made clear that to make it in that industry, you had to do the same. 

They are the school bully who finally got what was coming to him.

I talked at length to a pretty famous comedian the other day, who explained that in the comedy world there are two types of comics: those who have an eye on their audience and those who have an eye on Hollywood. 

You know the ones who love their audience (Chappelle, Louis C.K., Di Paolo, etc.) and the ones who hope they’ll land a sitcom, so they play it super-safe.

It’s a weird flip, to see that the edgy performer now is no different than a frightened high schooler dependent on fitting in rather than standing out. Maybe they were always that way, and it’s become super obvious as they desperately seek a safe haven in an increasingly irrelevant but skittish industry. Meanwhile, true to the flip, the ticket buyer emerges on top, offering a collective thumbs-down to the shitty woke-infested content Hollywood keeps serving up to people who prefer to get their sermons at church. 

It’s a joy to watch cowardly virtue signaling disguised as heroic diversity fall flat on its face.

Maybe Hollywood will wake up and start making fun stuff again. But in reality, do we really give a s–t? No. We’re done with movies. In a few years, we won’t even need the actors — they’ll be done by CGI and AI. Then where on earth will all that sanctimony go? Somewhere in Silicon Valley, I suppose.

As for cable news, I’m reading Axios research that shows all cable viewership is down in prime time in the first half of the year, except, of course, for Fox News, which is up a whopping 12 percent. Axios, oddly, lumped us in with an overall decline among other networks, perhaps to hide our success.

But it’s like lumping Michael Jordan in with the French army. Logically, none of this makes sense.

But one thing does: they suck and we don’t. And there’s a reason why.

Diversification. If you’re only about one thing — Trump evil! — what happens when that tool no longer works for you?

You have no more in your bag. That’s why CNN nearly destroyed itself, before desperately attempting to steer itself back to some moderate degree of sanity. When a one-trick pony loses its one trick, it fears the glue factory.

But this decline is due not to news exhaustion, but to hoax exhaustion.

The media and the public have flipped. It’s no longer the media telling us what’s news, but the reverse. 

The public no longer buys what the media is selling, understanding that most news is manufactured and curated for clicks and profits.

Now that they know that, they dictate the terms. It’s the best flip ever.

Excerpted from THE KING OF LATE NIGHT by Greg Gutfeld. Copyright © 2023 by Greg Gutfeld. Reprinted by permission of Threshold Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.