Apparently, Fox News thinks Greg Gutfeld is the conservative answer to Jon Stewart and John Oliver. As of May 31, he’s going to be hosting a one-hour comedy show on Fox News on Sunday nights.
From TVNewser:
The Greg Gutfeld Show is expected to have a comedic-commentary format, with parodies of current events and humorous monologues on news-worthy topics.
A couple of years ago, I described Gutfeld as amusing, at best, not funny. It was part of a post about a terrific review by Alexander Zaitchik of one of Gutfeld’s books.
Zaitchik’s comments seem especially apt now:
The right is delusional if it thinks it can replicate the success of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert with Gutfeldian rightwing “irreverence.” One of the reasons people are drawn to the Comedy Central shows aside from the jokes is they don’t trust other news sources, and Fox News especially. Whatever tweaks Gutfeld may make to his formula in the future, he seems constitutionally (and institutionally) incapable of the basic fact checking, let alone the kind of serious research that goes into the best bits on the Daily Show.
But hey, maybe Fox viewers will like it. After all, I’m laughing at just the thought of it.
And don’t worry Gutfeld fans (surely there must be some somewhere), he will continue to cohost The Five and appear on The O’Reilly Factor.
Right wing comedy is simply a contradiction in terms, as far as sane people go, at any rate. With power and wealth behaving badly towards the powerless and poor, the funny can only travel in one direction. How can you laugh at fulltime Walmart workers who have to rely on food stamps and donations of canned goods by customers to feed their families rather than laugh at the grasping billionaires, the laughably uneven playing field and the utterly corrupt politicians who’ve been bought and paid for to keep things as they are?
How can you point and giggle at the folk who stand for peace when kowtowing to the PNAC crazies and the ever-hungry military/industrial complex has cost your country so much – in young lives, international reputation and trillion upon trillion of cash that could have been used so much more positively?
