Fox News host Greg Gutfeld will appear on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on Thursday night. The late night crossover comes as the industry has taken notice of the longtime host’s successful late night program, which is far outpacing its major network competitors and overall costs.
The “Gutfeld!” namesake will join Fallon from the iconic Studio 6B in Rockefeller Center, located not far from FOX News Media’s New York City headquarters in midtown Manhattan, Fox News announced Thursday. “It’s the biggest crossover since the Harlem Globetrotters visited ‘The Golden Girls,’” Gutfeld joked when informing his viewers of the crossover.
“It looks like I’ll be on with the Jonas Brothers, which is great, I haven’t seen them in a while. A lot of people don’t know this, but I was one of the original members until they booted me out for being too hot,” Gutfeld added. “But it should be fun. Fallon seems like a great, genuine guy who wants to make people laugh instead of putting them to bed angrier than ‘The View’ at a salad bar.”
Gutfeld praised Fallon for largely staying out of the partisan political fray, at least to the extent of “the other guys” like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers. “Sitting with me proves he’s not afraid of upsetting his peers or afraid of my mesmerizing charm,” Gutfeld said.
“Remember, he was destroyed for humanizing [President] Trump by messing up his hair. The angry mob wanted a brutal take-down, but Jimmy did something different. He had fun, which is criminal to the liberal hive,” he added. The Fox host was speaking in reference to a notable pre-2016 election moment in which Fallon asked if he could touch then-candidate Trump’s hair.
Fallon was subsequently raked over the coals by the far-left for “normalizing” Trump to the “Tonight Show” audience. “If he wants to run his fingers through my hair, I will not complain. After all, the last time he did that, the guy became president,” Gutfeld joked.
The crossover comes as “Gutfeld!” has climbed its way to being the most-watched late-night program on television. It regularly outdraws major network competitors on CBS, ABC and NBC with a fraction of the cost. Gutfeld’s show employs about 20 people total, while the host’s annual salary tops out at $7 million.
This pales in comparison to CBS’ Stephen Colbert, whose show boasts an annual production cost of $100 million with around 200 employees. The show was reportedly operating at an annual loss of $40 million a year when the network decided to pull the plug last month.
Parent company Paramount cited financial constraints as the primary factor in axing the long-running program.