Time marches on.
Jon Stewart announced his retirement from the most tedious non-comedy show on TV.
Now Gutfeld is leaving Redeye. The landscape is changing. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Neither.
Truth is, they’re both gadflies. Ephemera. Neither one carries more weight than an insect. For completely opposite reasons. Yes, Gutfeld really is three times smarter than Stewart. But both of them are cripples. Stewart uses comedy to push politics. Gutfeld uses politics to push comedy. Ultimately, they’re nihilists. It’s always only about them when all is said and done. And the wings of their equally mighty egos are transparently thin. Stewart pretends he doesn’t have an ego. A lie. Gutfeld satirizes his ego by painting self deprecating word pictures meant to be seen as humility when his purpose is the exact opposite. Another, more subtle lie.
Tonight’s farewell performance by Gutfeld on Redeye was profoundly disappointing. Made me feel I’d been fooled all these years. I have seen good, insightful political commentary from right and left on the show over the years, leavened by humor. Yet when given the chance to characterize the show at the end of his run, Gutfeld chose to dwell on moments of outrage, excess, crudity, and absurdity. While he insisted that the show was never about him, he drove home the point that it was always about him, and his guests praised him lavishly for being such a generous host.
I guess you can take the kid out of Berkeley, but you can never take the Berkeley out of the kid. He’s not just physically short. He’s stunted morally and personally as well. He remains, a lot like Stewart, a little kid goofing on a grownup world he hasn’t the stature to comprehend. So committed to showing us he doesn’t take himself seriously that he ultimately fails to show he’s committed to anything beyond the next punchline.
So it doesn’t really matter that the two poles of comedic political commentary are moving on. After all these years, they were nothing but vaudeville, lacking substance, faith, and any purpose beyond parading their own egos on top of the waves of current events.
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Maybe so, although a judgment like “stunted morally and personally” seems to me an exaggeration of what we can discern without knowing him a lot better. He had a show to do at a time of night when audiences are puny in number and half asleep, when you have to be agile and fast moving. I thought he did that pretty durned well. Yes, I sometimes had to put aside my you-damned-kids-get-off-my-lawn instincts at the crude references and pool-boy jokes. But that’s a small matter; I am not in their targeted demographic, anyway. I see no sin in failing to be committed beyond the next punchline, if that indeed is true, when you’re on at 3 a.m. EST. There’s more to him than that, in my opinion — apparent when you read his essays.
He’s not Wm. F. Buckley, Jr., but WFB, Jr. would have failed miserably at 3 a.m. Sad to say but we need entertainers who can make being politically conservative cool. I’d give him three stars out of four for that.
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You know they don’t actually record the show at 3 am, don’t you?
Sorry, but I’ll stick by my assessment. After enough years the slick wears off, or at least you can begin to see through it. Why I’ll give him credit for taking only half as long as Stewart to sense when his act was wearing thin.
Ironically, one of the things that has made him an irritant to me is wondering what his wife must think of all this.
Don’t find his essays that great either. Like he’s imitating Jonah Goldberg by multiplying his devices by ten. There’s a sensation of fireworks more than filosophy.
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Isn’t Cool the name of his book that he was pushing on his last show? I agree with RFL.
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Dear Anonymous,
It was kind of you to inform me they don’t actually do the show at 3 a.m. Never would have guessed; they looked so perky and all.
Have no idea what Gutfeld’s wife thinks of the show, but his mom sure loved it. Remember when she made regular appearances? Weekly, I think. He adored her, obviously, and she him. It was one of the things that won me over.
To each his own.
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