Aside from the nightly interview with a talking copy of the New York Times and the earnest comments from the cherry-lipped lemon tarts brought in from the Fox newsroom, the highlight of Red Eye is usually the “Gregalogue,” a 90-second editorial, or rant, in which the host takes off after whatever news item or personage has annoyed him that day. Gutfeld himself has become a cult figure, which is why a legit publishing house like Grand Central has put out The Bible of Unspeakable Truths, a collection of his random writings-his feuilletons, as Gutfeld would never call them in a million years. I’ve met several Washingtonians who go to bed at a normal Washington bedtime-eight-thirty, nine-and watch the previous night’s Red Eye while downing their GoLean the next morning. Despite the absurd hour, Red Eye has acquired a large and intensely loyal audience, thanks in part to the magic of TiVo. If the idea was to keep the show on the QT, however, it was a bad idea. Maybe Ailes figured that because Gutfeld’s show would air during the graveyard shift, at 3 A.M., the network didn’t have much to lose. The larger question is how a man could be sufficiently elastic in his tastes to find both Greta van Susteren and Greg Gutfeld appealing. (I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that Bill O’Reilly had hired three dwarves once upon a time, either.) In the early days of the Huffington Post, Gutfeld briefly served as the house conservative blogger, and his inspired, lunatic ridicule of his leftwing fellow Huffers may have led Roger Ailes, the founding father of Fox News Channel, to hire him and give him a show.
NIGHTOWL WASHI PROFESSIONAL
This isn’t the usual professional path to an on-air job at Fox News-although if you told me that Sean Hannity once wrote the words “Abs are the new biceps” I wouldn’t fall over in a dead faint. He was fired from his next job, too, at Maxim, for running an article called “The Ikea Sex Party.” I guess Ikea objected. The “buzz” that followed was teeth-rattling, but it was the wrong kind of buzz. Gutfeld hired three dwarves to attend the session, take seats in the front row, munch loudly from bags of potato chips, make calls on their cell phones, ridicule whatever the participants said, and break wind.
NIGHTOWL WASHI HOW TO
At a Manhattan gathering of magazine editors, held annually so they can award prizes to one another and ponder their indispensable contribution to the nation’s cultural life, a panel discussion was convened on the topic of “Buzz” -how to get it, how to keep it, how to make it pay.
The greatest of his achievements, though, was not specifically commercial, or even editorial. Having grander ambitions, Gutfeld brought Stuff to grander heights, managing in the meantime to keep the teenagers sated-and in large numbers: Subscriptions increased by more than fifty percent under his editorship. From there he became top dog at Stuff, then as now a girly mag designed to be read with one hand by pimply teenage boys. At Prevention, Rodale’s health-and-fitness bulletin, he once captioned an illustration with the deathless (to me, anyway) sentence: “Abs are this year’s biceps.” He went on to edit Men’s Health, filling the office air with Marlboro smoke and frightening the natives.
NIGHTOWL WASHI SERIES
He came to the Spectator from UC Berkeley, which did not normally operate as a franchise in the Spectator’s farm system, and after he had mastered the trade of fielding faxes and slinging envelopes, he moved on to a series of magazine jobs that accelerated in importance and implausibility.
In the introduction to his new book, Gutfeld refers to his “unique and somewhat perplexing career,” so he can’t figure it out, either. How the Gutfeld of my memory-the wild man who ran the mail room at the American Spectator, where we both worked in the 1980s-became the much-fawned-over and much-reviled Gutfeld who hosts Red Eye, Fox News Channel’s weirdest and coolest broadcast, is something I’ll never be able to figure out.
When I close my eyes and think of Gutfeld, by contrast, I see a slenderer and much younger fellow with a thick head of tastefully moussed hair and a fifty-pound mail sack slung casually over his shoulder, hoping to impress the (female) interns and failing.
NIGHTOWL WASHI TV
When people close their eyes and think of Greg Gutfeld-more people do this than you might realize-they probably see a beefed-up dude dressed in Downtown black commanding the set of his own late-night TV show.
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