FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2025
And why does it get disappeared? A highly unusual thing takes place near the end of Amanda Hess's profile of the Gutfeld! show's Kat Timpf.
Timpf is one of two regular panelists on the Fox News Channel program. (The other regular panelist is a former professional "wrestler" named Tyrus who now performs as a comedian.)
Hess's lengthy profile of Timpf appeared in print editions of the New York Times on Sunday, September 28. The profile appeared at a deeply challenging time in its subject's life.
By most sane people's accounts, Timpf had dealt with these challenges quite bravely. Headline included, the profile starts as shown:
A Baby. A Double Mastectomy. Many Opinions From Fox News Viewers.
Inside Kat Timpf’s office at Fox News headquarters, her husband was holding the baby. “I have a little bit of drool on me, but it wasn’t there when I got here, I swear,” Ms. Timpf apologized as she settled behind her desk. Her husband, Cameron Friscia (he’s a consultant and combat veteran, they met on Raya), had swung by the office for a visit with their 5-month-old son. He laid the boy in his stroller and gently maneuvered him past the congratulations-slash-sympathy gifts piled on Ms. Timpf’s office floor. The father took the baby home. The mother got back to work.
“I’ve been through a lot, but I’m also still kind of going through it,” Ms. Timpf said. “Like, ‘I still don’t have nipples’ is probably the best way to describe it.”
Ms. Timpf is a co-host of “Gutfeld!,” Fox News’s spin on the late-night comedy show, which regularly draws more viewers than Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon or Stephen Colbert (though it airs earlier than those shows, at 10 p.m.). This has made Ms. Timpf the most watched woman in late-night television at a time when the late-night stage has become unexpectedly politically charged.
It has also made her an object of audience members’ fascination, concern, judgment and, occasionally, their madness. The spotlight has only intensified in the past year—the year that Ms. Timpf turned 36, got pregnant, was diagnosed with breast cancer, gave birth, had a double mastectomy, underwent reconstructive breast surgery and talked about it on “Gutfeld!,” a show named for its host, Greg Gutfeld.
As seems to be required by tribal law, Hess offered a misleading account of when the Gutfeld! program airs. The program does air at 10 p.m., but that is only true in the Eastern time zone.
Even at 10 p.m., Gutfeld! isn't a "late night" show. But it airs at 9 p.m. in the Central time zone and at 7 p.m. on the west coast. In east coast cities, at 10 p.m., Gutfeld! is a primetime show.
Out on the coast, the program goes on the air before traditional "prime time" has even started!
To appearance, the modern journalist is required to refer to Gutfeld! as a "late night" program. This allows the modern journalist to reinforce the Fox News Channel's marketing claim, according to which Greg Gutfeld, the program's host, is described as "The King of Late Night."
For whatever reason, Hess and her editors chose to further this branding scam as this profile started. But it was only as the profile continued that readers began to get a hint of what a TV viewer will hear if he or she decides to watch this "cable news" program.
Late in the profile, Hess finally gives her own account of what some such viewer will hear. But early on, as the profile continues, Times readers receive a first glimpse:
(Continuing directly)
Mr. Gutfeld’s style mixes anti-liberal insult comedy with relentless punchlines about women’s bodies—their age, their weight, their sexual attractiveness. Each night, Ms. Timpf sits at his right-hand side, playfully challenging him while staking out an alternate style of physical humor—one that centers her own experience inhabiting a woman’s body.
I met Ms. Timpf on a Tuesday morning in August, on her second day back at “Gutfeld!” after a reconstructive surgery in which the tissue expanders inserted behind her chest muscle during the mastectomy she underwent in March were replaced with permanent breast implants.
[...]
The night before, Ms. Timpf had made her return to “Gutfeld!” just as the backlash to the backlash to Sydney Sweeney’s campaign for American Eagle jeans was fomenting on the right. A former heavyweight pro wrestler known as Tyrus offered his take on Ms. Sweeney’s female critics: “They look like a bag of oatmeal and they’re ugly and mean,” he said. But Ms. Timpf spied an opening for a disarming joke, one that turned the controversy back on herself. “I was watching it on the couch,” she said of the ad. “And I thought: Should I have gone bigger?”
Even there, in paragraphs 5-8, Hess begins to describe the peculiar contents of this ugly "cable news" program. For whatever reason, its Adonis-like 61-year-old host "mixes anti-liberal insult comedy with relentless punchlines about women’s bodies—their age, their weight, their sexual attractiveness," Hess correctly reports.
Nor is this ugly personal style confined to the program's host. At the end of that passage, in paragraph 8, Hess quotes the former professional "wrestler" as he offered his own thoughts about the physical appearance of a group of female observers.
“They look like a bag of oatmeal and they’re ugly," the former professional "wrestler" thoughtfully said. What those critics actually said wasn't being examined. Instead, viewers were allowed to enjoy an insult about the way these women allegedly looked.
(Until recently, the former "wrestler" has routinely been described as weighing 375 pounds.)
This started to give Hess's readers a tiny hint of what they can expect to hear if they watch this weeknight program—a show which boasts the third highest viewership numbers in all of "cable news."
At this point, we'll offer an additional criticism of what Hess has written. In paragraph 5, she gives the impression—in our view, the false impression—that Timpf makes a habit of "challenging" the program's host when he makes his insulting remarks about the (alleged) physical appearance of the various women who disagree with his own perfect views.
We've been watching the Gutfeld! program for years. In our experience, any such challenges by Timpf, playful or otherwise, are few and quite far between.
In all honesty, we don't think we've ever seen Timpf pose any such challenge to these endless insults. Her reluctance to do so is directly acknowledged later in Hess's admiring profile—but we're almost at the end of the lengthy piece when Hess describes what she saw, and what she heard, when she sat in the studio audience on August 6 and watched a taping of that evening's program.
What did Hess see that night? As she nears the end of her report, she offers this description:
“Gutfeld!” styles itself as a late-night comedy show, but it is also the finale of Fox’s daily news reporting—a place where the network’s subtext can become text. When I attended a taping last month, I sat in the back row of the studio audience and looked down upon a circle of tufted armchairs arranged around a central coffee table...
Mr. Gutfeld perches in the center of Fox’s psychic den, a waggish variation on the sitcom patriarch. Ms. Timpf sits at his side, taking the role of the quirky sibling. “He always laughs like an older brother would when the little sister makes fun of him,” Tom O’Connor, the show’s executive producer, said. When I asked Ms. Timpf if she saw herself as Mr. Gutfeld’s little sister, she reminded me that, at 61, Mr. Gutfeld is 25 years older than she is.
At the top of the show, Mr. Gutfeld delivered a battery of topical jokes in which he matched pieces of the day’s news with verdicts on liberal women’s bodies. Hillary Clinton is ugly. Joy Behar is old. Nancy Pelosi is old. Rosie O’Donnell is fat, Whoopi Goldberg is fat, Lizzo is fat, a professor of political science you’ve never heard of is fat. As Mr. Gutfeld delivered yet another rant about the left-wing reaction to Ms. Sweeney’s ad, Ms. Timpf calmly waited her turn, then sarcastically congratulated Mr. Gutfeld for managing to call not just one, but multiple women fat. “What a segment,” she said.
“Greg chooses the topics,” Ms. Timpf told me. “When I host, the topics are different.” ...
Just for the record, Timpf almost never hosts.
In that passage, you're looking at paragraphs 26-29 of a lengthy profile which includes 37 paragraphs in all. In paragraph 29, we're told what Hess saw as she sat in the studio audience that night.
She saw the program's 61-year-old host perform his standard array of insults aimed at an array of liberal or progressive women, all of whom were fat fat fat and maybe ugly—just too f*cking fat.
The sheer stupidity of this behavior will possibly seem, to some observers, to be matched by its undisguised ugliness. For some reason, Hess chose to describe the author of this poison as "waggish," as if he's really just the harmless "prankster" described in the headline of this earlier profile by Colby Hall, the otherwise insightful director of the Mediaite news site.
To Hess, he's waggish—to Hall, he's a prankster. Meanwhile, riddle us this:
To what extent, and with how much fervor, did Timpf "sarcastically challenge" the program's host for his tsunami of insults this night? Indeed, to what extent did she "challenge" Greg Gutfeld at all?
To what extent did she "challenge" Gutfeld? Thanks to the invaluable Internet Archive, you can judge that for yourself:
Greg Gutfeld was on vacation on the night of Monday, August 4—the night of Timpf's return to the Gutfeld! show. Still, if you want to watch that program in its entirely, you can start by clicking here.
The program Hess attended was the program of Wednesday, August 6. To see the program's waggish host denounce all those women for being so fat, you need to watch the start of the show.
You can do that by clicking this. The reference to Joy Behar as "an old bag" arrives at 10:01.
To watch other such denunciations, you should click here for a later segment. As you will see, Tyrus and the poisonous Julie Banderas join Gutfeld in ridiculing that very fat female professor, who is judged to be much less attractive than Sweeney, a young movie star.
Timpf's alleged challenge—"What a segment," she does in fact say—comes in response to all that.
Timpf has responded bravely to her recent medical challenge. That said, we watched the August 6 show in real time, and we're not sure we actually thought she was "challenging" Gutfeld at all.
On the whole, we'll extend (minor) kudos to Hess for giving readers some idea of what actually takes place, on a nightly basis, on this strange "cable news" program. Other journalists who have profiled Gutfeld or the Gutfeld! show have almost wholly refused to describe the program's actual contents.
We're sorry to say that we'd include the New York Times' David Marchese in that group. We refer to his new interview / profile of Gutfeld, a piece which will appear in the New York Times Magazine in Sunday's print editions.
Hess was willing to give Times readers some idea of the relentless contents of this heavily watched TV show. Even there, she failed to describe the full-blown "misogyny" which some observers have claimed to see as they've described this show.
That M-word does appear one time in Hess's lengthy profile. It appears in paragraph 23, in a statement by Nick Marx, "an academic who studies the conservative comedy scene."
Next week, as we consider the throwback gender politics of much of the MAGA world, we'll look at that fleeting remark by Marx. Also, we'll look at other profiles of Gutfeld, Marchese's included, whose authors have worked quite hard to avoid reporting what actually happens on this peculiar show.
Some will see this program as poisonous. Others will watch the show and think what they're seeing is highly insightful and that it's all being done in good fun.
However a person may come down on such matters, at least two things are quite obvious:
The Gutfeld! show departs in the most obvious ways from standard journalistic practices of the past many years. Also, major journalists at major Blue American orgs seem determined to avoid reporting what actually happens on this increasingly popular program.
They almost seem to be deferring to Fox and to "The King of Late Night!" But why in the world would these journalistic superstars be inclined to do something like that?
In our view, Hess's profile barely scratches the surface of the atavistic loathing of women which drives the Gutfeld! program. Newspapers like the New York Times seem quite reluctant to report what happens on the Gutfeld! show, or on other Fox News Channel programs like, for example, The Five.
Our questions, therefore, would be these:
Does Blue America have a sexual politics in any real way at all? Even if in the slightest way, does Blue America actually care?
Next week: Rosie O'Donnell's gynecologist. Also, has Hunter Biden started [BLEEP]ing his stepmother yet?
