“Gutfeld!” returned to late night on Friday, the Fox News show’s first taping since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the namesake host started his monologue with a grave face and a personal note about the slain conservative activist.
“All of us here knew Charlie,” Greg Gutfeld said. “I’m pretty sure you knew him too … you might have met the guy. He was pretty easy to reach. So you can imagine what it was like here at Fox when we heard he was shot. The whole place went silent.”
The incessant jokester couldn’t help himself, however, and the studio audience also fell silent at his next line.
“I mean, even [Brian] Kilmeade stopped talking.”
Outside of a single nervous titter – and someone off-camera whispering “God!” – you could’ve heard a pin drop in the studio.
“You can laugh,” Gutfeld said.
A few audience members complied, and so Gutfeld rolled on.
“Jesse [Watters] was so shocked, his hairpiece turned white,” Gutfeld continued, now drawing a smatter of chuckles. “Dana [Perino] stopped working on her list of interns to make cry.”
Again, crickets.
Perhaps just in time, Gutfeld dropped attempts at levity, and returned to gravity:
“It’s one of those pieces of news that scrambles your brain,” he said. “You can almost feel the circuitry try to find a pathway for this new information. So how do you process it today? Generally, when something awful happens, to distract ourselves we will see how other people are handling it. You guessed it: terribly.”
He then rolled a series of media pundit bad-takes, including the one that got MSNBC contributor Matthew Dowd fired.
“So why was Charlie assassinated?,” Gutfeld concluded. “It wasn’t about his ideas, it is that he was so good at them. He was the best. There was no one like him. This will backfire. Look at the history of those murdered because they were good. MLK Jr.’s dream did not die with him. Or JFK’s. Or Lincoln’s. As much as I hate the song “Imagine,” it still gets played thousands of times a day around the globe. So their legacy grows, and Charlie’s will as well, beyond his wildest dreams. … He already knew his impact, which will only grow with his passing. … A man whose entire career was built on polite conversation. But that grief now hardens into resolve. If you want to kill an idea, the worst thing you can do is kill the man behind it. Because that gives the idea not just likes, but also wings.”
Watch the entire monologue in the video above.
