The Right Wants Comedians Who Skip Politics and Deliver Big Yuks Like Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters

Legalize comedy!

You hear it from frustrated Republicans all the time: Why can’t late night comics like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert skip politics and just be funny? It’s easy to see where they’re coming from — late night shows have trended decidedly MSNBC-ward. It’s hard to tell at this point if Stephen Colbert is Chris Hayes with more jokes or if Chris Hayes is Stephen Colbert with fewer jokes, and arguably the breakout late night “comedy” bit of the past decade is “get emotional about your son’s pre existing medical condition.” Carnac the Magnificent and Stupid Pet Tricks are now so far in the past that they seem like vaudeville.

There should probably be room for someone in the Carson/Conan space to emerge. It won’t be Jimmy Fallon, because Fallon is on Trump’s enemies list for some reason (maybe Trump thought Fever Pitch strayed too far from the book?). There are non-political comedians out there but there are precious few in late night. And it seems fair to ask: If MAGA doesn’t like this cohort of hosts, whom would they prefer?

Trump himself has thrown out a name:

You might not know Greg Gutfeld if you don’t inhabit the Fox News Alternative Reality. Gutfeld is the key figure in two Fox News shows: He’s part of the panel on The Five — if The View is for wine moms, then The Five is the same show but for beer dads — and he hosts a 10PM panel show called Gutfeld! You know how Tyler Perry was famous for like a decade among Black people before white people heard of him? Greg Gutfeld is like that for Fox News fans; he’s very famous with ten percent of America and the other 90 percent wouldn’t recognize him if he kicked down their door and started doing schtick.

So: What kind of hilarious rib-tickelry does Gutfeld serve up on Fox News? Here’s an amuse bouche from shortly after the Charlie Kirk shooting:

Okay: I added the “boiiiiinnnnggg!” and “AROOOOOO-GAH!” But the rest is classic, gut-busting Gutfeld. Oh frivolity, thy name is Greg Gutfeld! When the muses seek to coax japery from on high, they could do no better than to summon the font of jocular wit known throughout the land known as Gutfeld!

Here’s another wacky knee slapper from Fox’s Prince of the Punchline:

Again: I added the sound effects, though you probably didn’t notice them because you were laughing so hard. And there’s a comment at the core of Gutfeld’s joke: Shallow putdowns like the ones used by him and Trump are different from extreme rhetoric that demonizes a person’s political opponents. Of course, you’d have to be brain dead or trapped on an ice floe for the past decade — and probably both — to not know that Trump doesn’t limit himself to “silly names”. Trump demonizes his opponents using extreme language on a regular basis. Here’s a supercut of Trump calling Kamala Harris a “fascist” and a “communist”, here’s him sharing a meme calling Democrats “the party of hate, evil, and Satan”, and here’s Trump just the other day telling a military crowd “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called ‘The Democrats.’” The “threat to chairs” line, obviously, is comic gold — I’m not disputing that the “threat to chairs” joke will appear on every Ten Jokes That Defined An Era list that will be published 100 years from now. But one could argue that the comment beneath Gutfeld’s joke is blatant partisan hackery.

And Greg Gutfeld isn’t the only Funny Falstaff of Fox: Jesse Watters parlayed guest appearances on several Fox shows into his own primetime show. Below is a clip of him doing a hilarious bit about the Middle East, Asia, Latin America — really the whole world — and I won’t add sound effects this time, but I will add background music.

What Carson-esque easygoing affability! Also, Watters recently said that January 6 was staged¹, and he may have faked an interview with a member of Antifa. So, it’s probably fair to call the commentary underpinning Watters’ jokes “Fox News quality”.

These clips aren’t random samples, of course; I’m picking some of Gutfeld and Watters’ worst moments. Gutfeld tells jokes; here’s a recent “desk piece” — decide for yourself whether or not it’s funny. Jesse Watters made his name doing the mirror image of those Daily Show pieces where a correspondent gawks at the world’s dumbest Trump supporters — here’s one of his bits. Whether any of what either guy does is funny is subjective.

But what’s not subjective is that both Gutfeld and Watters are political. They’re political and partisan, just like Colbert and Kimmel. Some people say that they pine for the days of apolitical late night comedy, or that they just want their political comedy to avoid a partisan bent. But I think the truth is: Many of those people would be fine with comedy that reflects their views. It’s not that they think the hosts are too opinionated; it’s that they don’t like the hosts’ opinions.

The Balkanization of political comedy seems inevitable in light of the Balkanization of media, generally. The monoculture is dead, we now have bespoke media environments for different viewpoints, and that extends to comedy. Political comedy and political commentary are either converging or have converged — it might just be one genre now called “political entertainment”. Kimmel, Colbert, Gutfeld, and Watters are in the same genre, and for that matter, so are Maddow, Hannity, and those lovebirds at Morning Joe. Maybe you think that’s good, maybe you think that’s bad, maybe you just want to watch old Conan clips and wonder what happened to that type of humor (I know my opinion). But people who want to replace Colbert with Gutfeld shouldn’t pretend that they simply miss the laughs.

---

1. Everyone seems to have missed this because it was tucked into a long list of things, but what else could “[Trump’s political opponents] staged a coup” mean in that sentence other than that January 6 was a false flag?