HELLO STRANGER: Gutfeld wasn't "mass market" back then!

THURSDAY, JULY 31, 2025

He's very "mass market" today: What did the citizens of sacred Troy think? What did they think in the terrible moment when they first saw the murderous Achaeans coming over the walls?

Their noble prince Hector—their sacred city's greatest defender—had been slain by Achilles. Achilles had then dragged his body behind his chariot as Hector's parents—King Priam and Queen Hecuba—watched in horror from atop their city's high walls.

Soon, the furious victors came over the walls. For hundreds of years, every Greek citizen understood what happened that night, or so said Professor Knox:

The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history...to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

So it went as sacred Troy died. Is the Blue American civilization, such as it was, being overrun now? 

We can't really say that it isn't! One oddity of the current assault is this:

Even as a furious group of strangers continue to swarm over the walls, those of us in Blue America agree to ignore their advances. This makes us more like the denizens of Camus' fictional Oran, less like the determined Trojans who fought and died as they held off the Achaeans for ten years.

Eventually, the furious Achaeans came over the walls and sacred Troy did in fact die, just as Hector had prophesied. Last evening, Greg Gutfeld started his prime time "cable news" show with a couple of minutes of jokes, as he always does.

Last evening, that handful of jokes lasted until 10:03 p.m.  The handful unspooled like this:

As the premise of his first joke, he restated an unfounded claim about former President Clinton—that he had visited Epstein Island some 28 times.

(Astoundingly, MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace had done the same thing the day before. There's no known cure for this.)

That was the way it started. His second joke turned on the premise that former prime minister Trudeau isn't really a man. 

His third joke—it was based on a survey he misdescribed—turned on the premise that Michelle Obama is a man.  As we've noted, this has become a very familiar source of derision on this little's mutt's program.

That joke about Michelle Obama the secret man produced extended audience applause. Those were the stranger's first three jokes. Predictably enough, his fourth joke went like this:

GUTFELD (7/30/25): Geese have reportedly caused a popular beach in Finland to be covered in "a shocking amount of poop."

"Define shocking amount of poop," said Joe Biden's night nurse.

[PHOTO OF PRESIDENT BIDEN]

AUDIENCE: [Scattered applause]

The jokes about President Biden BLEEPing his pants and soiling the Oval Office had been featured, night after night, all through 2024.

He returned to that theme last night. Soon, we had his latest joke about Ruchard Gere and gerbils.

For unknown reasons, this has become a favorite recent topic. AI Overview fills us in:

The rumor that Richard Gere was hospitalized for a "gerbilling" incident is an urban legend and is completely untrue. The story, which involves the fictitious sexual practice of inserting a gerbil into one's rectum, has circulated for decades, but there's no evidence to support it. According to Reddit users, the rumor likely started as a malicious fabrication and has been perpetuated through word-of-mouth and online discussion. 

The premise dates to 1998. The little guy can't seem to quit it. For the debunking of this ancient claim by Snopes, you can just click here.

By now, it was only 10:02, but the little guy was on a familiar roll. After a joke about "Butt Plug Night" at a WNBA game—inevitably, the WNBA is becoming a favorite target—the little guy offered a joke about Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad and a nationwide rise in "boners."

In closing, inevitably, the little guy turned to this:

GUTFELD: Finally, scientists are now dressing pigs in clothes and burying them in Mexico.

Except for one that fled to Ireland.

[PHOTO OF ROSIE O'DONNELL]

AUDIENCE: [Extended yelping and applause]

By now, it was 10:03 Eastern—7:03 out on the coast. Mercifully, after less than three minutes, he had completed his opening handful of jokes. 

It had been a painfully typical set of jokes from this possibly strange little man, and yes—this is all part of the way a collection of strangers are currently coming over the walls, even as Blue America's hapless defenders insist on looking away.

That was the handful of jokes. To watch that three minutes of jokes, you can just click here.

Strangers were coming over the walls as the audience yelped and cheered. To help you see that strangers can be found almost anywhere, one good and decent person recently said that he himself doesn't care for Gutfeld's brand of humor, but he praised the Fox News Channel's Suzanne Scott for putting Gutfeld's brand of "smart, fun, non-lecturey comedy" on the air.

"Smart!" Yes, that's what he said!

Back in February, a lengthy profile in Variety had misdescribed Gutfeld's comedy in an even more ridiculous way. So it goes at times like these as, for better or worse, a long-established, prevailing culture is perhaps being taken down.

What explains the peculiar behavior of this strange little man with the large "cable news: audience? Incredibly, the fellow is sixty years old, but he still behaves this way on a nightly basis, with tribal helpmates like Tyrus (former professional "wrestler") and Kennedy (former MTV VJ) fake-laughing by his side.

Just for the record, it's more typically the 83-year-old Joy Behar, or the women of The View as a group, who are compared on a nightly basis to cattle, pigs, horses and cows—or, more simply, to "livestock. They're also routinely mocked for being insufficiently sexually attractive to satisfy the requirements of this bizarre, deeply strange little man.

This is all part of the current war on Blue America, much of which is occurring under the radar. That said, this fellow has pretty much always been like this—or so it may seem, based upon a profile which appeared, long ago, in the New York times.

We think we saw the profile once before. Yesterday, with a fortuitous click, we stumbled upon it again.

Warning! It's extremely rare to see a profile in a major publication where the writer makes so little attempt to hide his disdain, or perhaps his contempt, for the person being profiled. 

For that reason, we're surprised that the profile ever appeared. But it did appear, in the New York Times, on September 4, 2003.

The writer of the profile, Warren St. John, was a reporter for the Times from 2002 through 2008. He was apparently 33 at the time his profile appeared. 

St. John didn't try to hide his disdain for the stranger in his midst. The stranger had just been dropped from a publishing post at a certain "lad magazine." Strangely unflattering headline included, the profile started as shown:

A Publishing Pest Moves On

FOR Greg Gutfeld, the 38-year-old former editor of the brooding lad magazine Stuff, the set-up was just too rich: an earnest group of publishing types were gathering at the American Society of Magazine Editors in Manhattan for a seminar in April on ''What Gives a Magazine Buzz.'' His first thought upon hearing of the meeting was, in his words, ''If you need to go to that seminar, you're hopeless.'' His second thought, he said, was dwarfs.

Mr. Gutfeld called a local casting agent and hired three dwarfs for the day. He equipped them with cellphones and bags of potato chips and sent them into the seminar. As editors from Rolling Stone, Glamour and O: The Oprah Magazine opined on the serious business of buzz creation, the actors began chomping loudly on handfuls of potato chips as their cellphones started ringing furiously. (The actors, of course, loudly took the calls.)

After 15 minutes or so of steadily escalating mayhem, the actors were ejected, but not before giving those editors an object lesson in buzz creation, Gutfeld style.

Sipping a Stoli and orange on Wednesday night in the Bellevue, a favorite Hell's Kitchen dive with glam rock on the jukebox and a coffin next to the bar, Mr. Gutfeld said the prank was in keeping with his personal credo. ''I love the idea of showing up at a place and just disrupting it,'' he said.

That's the way the fellow had approached the seminar on creating buzz. 

The pitiful conduct with the "three dwarfs" had happened back in April. Now, though, it was September—and according to the profile, a certain reign had ended at Stuff. 

This is what St John wrote as he continued directly:

A day later, on Thursday, Mr. Gutfeld's reign of disruption came to an end, when he stepped aside as editor of Stuff to become ''director of brand development'' for the magazine, a job in which he is ostensibly to promote his style of bizarro humor in other media, like television. The new arrangement, billed as a promotion for Mr. Gutfeld, has a certain neatness to it; he gets to pursue a long-held ambition to go big with his own brand of dark, self-loathing humor, and Dennis Publishing gets its magazine back from a self-described loud-mouth, troublemaker and freak.

Mark Golin, a friend of Mr. Gutfeld who develops online content at AOL Time Warner and who once edited Maxim, said that the dark nature of his friend's sense of humor limited Stuff's appeal ''to aficionados and people in prison.''

''It's not necessarily the most mass market,'' he said.

It's not necessarily mass market? We'll return to that assessment below. For now, let's return to the fun with the dwarfs:

Later in the profile, St John suggested that Gutfeld had been bumped from his editor's post in part because of that event, but also because of a wide array of arguably strange behaviors.

For better or worse, St. John seemed to disapprove of what he called "lad culture." With respect to Gutfeld's tenure at Stuff, here's part of what that "lad culture" had entailed:

Mr. Gutfeld said that his move is fine with him. During his rampage as Stuff's editor, the magazine's circulation rose from 750,000 to 1.2 million, but it is still far below the 2.5 million readership of its more accessible sibling publication Maxim. But along the way, Mr. Gutfeld said, he has been a frustrated man—frustrated that more people don't acknowledge the brilliance of, say, the Bathroom Tapes, a regular feature that makes editorial fare of conversations tape-recorded in the stalls of women's bathrooms in various Manhattan nightclubs; frustrated that more people don't identify with the self-loathing genius of his profile of a man with leprosy, who, it turned out, had a much more fulfilled life than Mr. Gutfeld himself. (The headline: ''So a Leper Walks Into a Bar—and You Find Out YOUR Life Is a Joke.'')

Mr. Gutfeld thinks he can find his audience through television and the stage. He will be working with the Endeavor Agency in Los Angeles to translate Stuff features into the sort of thing lad culture will watch after a few rounds of Grand Theft Auto III and reruns of ''The Simpsons.'' He wants to make a theater production from the dialogue of the Bathroom Tapes feature, which he sees as a kind of ''Vagina Monologues'' for a male audience.

''It could be huge,'' Mr. Gutfeld said.

Mr. Gutfeld said that his former magazine, and to some degree his life, takes its comic energy from the juxtaposition of the comfortable and familiar with the dark and disturbing. For example, the magazine's always puzzling last page typically features a close-up photo of a cute stuffed animal with a depraved line of text like ''Please kill me.'' Mr. Gutfeld said that joke is emblematic of his world view.

And so on at length, like that.

Was or is anything wrong with Mr. Gutfeld's sense of humor? By contemporary standards, the joking in which he engages now, on a nightly basis, almost insists on being called "openly misogynistic."

That said, is anything wrong with that? Or as these strangers come over the walls, is Blue America simply learning that a lot of people didn't like the structure of the new "sexual politics" which began emerging from the women's movement around, let's say, 1970? Do people just think that it's good clean fun to hear women compared to horses, pigs, cattle and cows on a nightly basis?

A great deal more was included in that somewhat unusual New York Times profile, including Gutfeld's  ruminations upon his lifelong failure to attract women:

Though Stuff is crammed with photos of young models in bikinis, Mr. Gutfeld said his quest to be funny keeps him ''inside my own head.'' He said he hasn't had much luck with women.

''I've dated but I've never been successful in that realm,'' Mr. Gutfeld said. ''I'm a tourist in the real world, and that prevents you from doing what normal people do.''

If he was being quoted fairly, the fellow said he wasn't normal with respect to that realm. There may have been decades of pain lurking there at that point. We've long suggested that we should remember to "pity the child."

Were decades of pain perhaps lurking there? If so, a person could even imagine that the fellow is still lashing out.

St. John made no attempt to hide his utter disdain for the stranger before him. As for that stranger's sensibility, let the word go forth to the nations:

''It's not necessarily the most mass market,'' the stranger himself had said.

Today, that same sensibility seems to be very mass market. It's smeared all over the Fox News Channel, where he joins his towel-snapping bro, Jesse Watters, as one of the two biggest stars.

As people applaud his horses, pigs and cattle jokes, is Blue America going down, even as its sophisticated leading tribunes insist on looking away? Also, what did Emmylou Harris hear, for years, in the mournful lyrics of that mournful Carter Family song?

She sang it again and again. She drew it out in beautiful ways, on this occasion with Ricky Skaggs—in Germany, no less!

Hello Stranger, the first lyric says. We'd love to know what she heard in the evocative, slightly mysterious lyrics of the mournful American song.

Tomorow: What he said, last Thursday night, about Obama's treason

The discography: Regarding the Emmylou Harris renditions, our favorite live performance of Hello Stranger had always been the version she performed with Rodney Crowell.

Alas! It seems to have disappeared from YouTube. Nothing gold can stay?