Photo via @ndrew_lawrence/Twitter
April 6, 2021, 12:59 pm
Brace yourselves, Fox News is attempting comedy again. Clearly enamored with the high ratings enjoyed by late-night talk shows like The Late Show with Steven Colbert and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Fox has given their co-host of The Five Greg Gutfeld another chair to lean back and smirk in while he makes “jokes” that his own audience barely laughs at.
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Future human anthropologists will never be able to explain why they decided to name the show after the man’s last name, which sounds like it could be a common name for a gastrointestinal syndrome, other than the man’s need for his name to be on everything.
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He already had a The Greg Gutfeld Show and sure likes referring to his own name or the shortened version “GG” a lot.
Clips from the show’s first episode are now going around Twitter and causing mass levels of secondhand embarrassment.
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Gutfeld manages to start out with a cringe-inducing joke that goes from “kids in cages” to making a joke about child sexual abuse, setting the tone for the rest of the show.
“I’m as giddy as Kamala Harris explaining kids in cages,” Gutfeld told viewers at the top of the show. “Or Woody Allen hearing about kids in cages.”
He goes on to make a tired joke about Joe Biden being old and almost certainly leaning into the conspiracy theory that he has some kind of dementia or other cognitive deficit, then mocks Hunter Biden’s struggles with cocaine addiction by saying that he will bring the “extra cheese” for his dad’s pizza. Hunter Biden recently revealed that at some of his worst moments, he believes he smoked parmesan cheese out of the carpet in a desperate attempt to sooth his intense cravings and stop withdrawal symptoms that would make Greg Gutfeld cry.
And those were probably the best jokes.
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Gutfeld goes on to do a weird bit about MSNBC’s Brian Williams reporting from Mars, possibly referring to a six-year-old scandal in which Williams was caught either lying about or misremembering an incident in Iraq with a helicopter, depending on who you believe.
Humor is subjective, of course, but it’s painfully noticeable how few laughs Gutfelt gets on this joke from his own audience as the bit drags on. The following bit where two random white people on CNN argue about who’s the racist does better.
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The segment brings up memories of the time Fox News tried to turn The O’Reilly Factor into the Daily Show by sending out a correspondent to Chinatown to be racist to and generally humiliate random Chinese people for no apparent reason. That was worse than this opening episode of Gutfeld!, but the new show still has plenty of time to get worse.
The Daily Beast asked some actual comedians to give their thoughts on the premier of Gutfeld!, including Nightly Show writer Sasha Stewart, who mostly feels bad for the people behind the scenes.
“Just because something has the cadence of a joke does not make it a joke,” she said. “I’m sorry for the five staffers who make up the laugh track. I know they’re staffers because it’s the kind of sharp, pained laugh of a person who’s barely getting paid enough to be there.”
And even they wouldn’t laugh at the Brian Williams bit.
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Blaire Erskine, maker of some of Twitter’s favorite satire videos mocking Trump supporters, had a few pointed questions she would like answered.
“Why does he call himself ‘GG’ as if he’s somebody’s grandmother?” she asked. “Why do I feel like he’s reading his opening manifesto from the teleprompter for the very first time? But more importantly, why is he white-knuckle clutching a clipboard holding what appears to be a stack of empty file folders?”
Back on Twitter, people have plenty more thoughts to share on this new Fox News program.
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*First Published: April 6, 2021, 12:59 pm
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