Greg Gutfeld

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

Bill Burr is going the way of the media armchair scolds

Bill Burr has built a successful stand-up comedy and film career on being the cranky scold next door – and his acts have always been tinged with the politics of the moment. He built his reputation as an expert on reading a room and knowing exactly how uncomfortable to make the people in said room while also making them laugh.Beginning some time last year, however, Burr’s act started to risk taking a backseat to his media armchair-political scolding, whether it’s Israel, Ben Shapiro or now Elon Musk. It’s one thing to work material about any of those topics into a stand-up routine, as Burr has done with Israel, when he spoke about “launching missiles at people using kids as human shields.

Wednesday

Tristan Justice

Conservatives who complain about Bill Maher are missing the point

Every time Bill Maher goes viral for being a "non-woke" liberal, the conservative pundit class is eager to remind readers that Maher is not one of them. It’s a pedantic and pointless exercise, because Maher has never claimed to be.  Case in point, earlier this month, National Review published another piece in a long trilogy of tired conservative columns bitching about Maher acting as some sort of “leftist agent” because he “has always made his bed with the mainstream.” “As entertainment,” wrote culture critic Armond White, “Real Time has a limited audience of HBO subscribers, yet its clips serve as a crutch for conservative TV programs — those outlets too feckless to generate their own talking points but that are always following the lead of left-wing media.

bill maher

Tuesday

Cockburn

Is Fox News self-immolating?

Fox News has announced its new primetime lineup post-Tucker Carlson: Jesse Watters will take over the coveted 8 p.m. ET slot vacated by Tucker, while Laura Ingraham is moving from 10 p.m. to the 7 p.m. hour. Sean Hannity will stay in his spot at 9 p.m., and Greg Gutfeld is slotted forward an hour to 10 p.m. The shuffle is an attempt by executives to resuscitate the network after the unceremonious firing of its top host, Tucker Carlson, which led several loyal viewers to jump ship.

jesse watters fox news

Thursday

Cockburn

Tucker Carlson is the new Voldemort

Murdoch gets what Murdoch wants — and this time, it’s to erase any evidence that Tucker Carlson ever existed. The media mogul is so insistent that the “T”-word remain unspoken that he has purportedly banned any mention of the ex-host across the Fox networks.  This is bad news for Chadwick Moore, author and contributing editor at The Spectator after he announced his new book, Tucker, that comes out next month. Moore tweeted that he’d been blacklisted from the network after announcing the book, saying: “I’m not allowed on Fox anymore, because I wrote a book about @TuckerCarlson. I’ve been banned from the network.

vice president tucker carlson

Tuesday

Cockburn

Where does Tucker Carlson go from here?

Fox News stunned its viewers — and, according to sources within the company, its own staff — when it let go of primetime host Tucker Carlson on Monday. Fox News employees were said to be "shocked" and "upset" when they read the public press release announcing Tucker's departure from the network. "FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," read the muted release. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor." Speculation as to the reasons behind Tucker's abrupt exit has run rampant. The initial online consensus was that Tucker was out due to his being named prominently in Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Fox — but that doesn't explain why Maria Bartiromo and Judge Jeanine Pirro are still on the air.

tucker carlson

Wednesday

Micah Mattix

Can right-wing comedy be funny?

Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx try to do a couple things in their new book, That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them. For starters, they hope to show their liberal readers — and the book is clearly written for those on the left — that there is such a thing as “right-wing comedy.” It is not an “obvious oxymoron,” as many on the left assume. Conservatives’ “post-9/11 blunders” made them easy targets for the left-leaning (and increasingly left-wing) Saturday Night Live, Stephen Colbert, and David Letterman. While comedy and “left-wing oppositionality” seemed a “blissful marriage,” there is no reason to assume the “eternal, exclusive nature of that union.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Apocalypse, please: Climate Night looms

Does humanity deserve a prolonged existence on Earth? Cockburn begs the question after learning that tonight is Climate Night on America’s late-night ‘light entertainment’ programs. ‘7 Shows. 1 Planet. Hot Enough For You?’, asks the poster, which depicts TBS’s Samantha Bee brandishing a whiteboard, Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah, CBS’s Stephen Colbert and James Corden posing with globes, NBC’s Seth Meyers holding a pot plant…and stock images of his network mate Jimmy Fallon and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who presumably care about the climate a little, but not enough to actually strike a pose for it. https://twitter.

climate night