Has Late Night TV Lost Its Edge? The Kimmel-Gutfeld Showdown, Comedy’s Changing Face, and Why the Punchlines Don’t Land

If you’ve tuned into late night TV recently, you may have noticed something strange: what used to be a playground for sharp wit and cathartic laughter now feels painfully earnest, oddly somber, and overwhelmingly political. Where viewers once came for zingers about pop culture and deft roasting of the day’s villains, the focus has shifted—now many hosts anchor their monologues around pointed commentary with a side of admonishment, drawing an invisible line between “us” and “them.” Nobody embodies this change more than Jimmy Kimmel, the once unpredictable prankster now frequently seen fighting back tears and launching into lectures about real-world crises and American politics.

And nobody has exploited this transformation more ruthlessly than Greg Gutfeld—the irreverent Fox News personality whose rise marks a new era in late night and a challenge to the irrelevance of sentimental, predictable hosts.

So what went wrong for Kimmel and the old guard, and how did Gutfeld seize the moment?

From Bartender to Moralist: The Kimmel Evolution

Jimmy Kimmel’s early career was built on wild, unscripted energy. “The Man Show,” trampoline stunts, and beer-soaked tomfoolery were his tools. Later, on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” he found a groove riffing on news, Hollywood, and the absurdity of everyday life—one minute gleefully roasting celebrities, the next pulling elaborate pranks on the unsuspecting public. He was sharp, goofy, occasionally crude, but rarely predictable.

But over the past decade, Kimmel’s monologues took a sharp turn. Politics seeped in, alongside real tears: heartfelt pleas for healthcare reform after his infant son’s surgery, emotional calls for gun control, impassioned rants about COVID and vaccines. “If you’re not vaccinated, you shouldn’t get a hospital ICU bed,” Kimmel once quipped (or declared, depending on your reading). More recently, he’s accused Trump supporters of not understanding the harm they’ve caused: “They just don’t know what they’ve done … they don’t realize how badly they’ve hurt themselves.” These are not one-off moments—they’re recurring themes.

The comedy, critics say, fell away. The laughs often gave way to lectures, followed by a polite, almost obligatory applause. The implied message: you don’t just have to laugh, you have to agree.

Greg Gutfeld: The Anti-Kimmel

Enter Greg Gutfeld, the brash contrarian whose own late-night endeavor started as something of a wild experiment. While Kimmel (and the equally earnest Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and others) doubled down on partisanship and moralizing, Gutfeld did the opposite. His show—simply “Gutfeld!”—felt less like an assignment and more like a party: part improv, part stand-up, unfiltered, sometimes crossing lines, always aiming for the punchline first.

What’s remarkable is that Gutfeld doesn’t shy away from the fact he isn’t a traditional comedian. Yet in lampooning Kimmel, he positions himself as the inheritor of late night’s core purpose—making people laugh, not making them think or feel guilty. “Kimmel has abdicated his role of a comedian and he’s now just a political hack … which I’m grateful for—because then I get the turf to myself,” Gutfeld declared.

The results are in the ratings. In 2024, “Gutfeld!” regularly outpaces Kimmel among key demos, landing in the top slot for late-night viewership, particularly among younger, working-class audiences who are weary of being scolded.

Comedy as Connection, Not Condescension

At the heart of this feud is a fundamental disagreement about the role of comedy. Is it therapy for the nation? Should it challenge the viewer’s assumptions, call out injustice, and push for change? Or is its job to bridge divides with laughter too honest—and too sharp—to be comfortable?

Gutfeld and his fans say Kimmel’s tears, lectures, and palpable distress aren’t just unfunny; they’re out of touch. When jokes land like homework assignments, nobody wants to stay for detention. “People don’t want a moral receipt with their monologue,” Gutfeld says. “That’s not comedy, that’s homework.”

He skewers Kimmel’s transformation as a kind of hypocrisy: “He built his early career on crude jokes and edgy bits—and now he pretends like he never touched that kind of material.” Old clips of Kimmel dressing in blackface or cheerleading for frat-boy antics go viral, each one seeming to contradict the new, more sanctimonious host.

Late Night’s Identity Crisis

The Kimmel-Gutfeld clash is more than just personal animus—it’s a culture war over the future of televised comedy. The old networks, for fear of backlash, have cleaned up the jokes, channeled every punchline through legal and HR departments, and softened the edges until the results feel sterile and safe. As Gutfeld puts it: “It’s satire on life support—a watered down, sanitized version of comedy that’s more concerned with political approval than audience reaction.”

Meanwhile, networks celebrate droves of “likes” from social media’s loudest activists. But the median viewer? He or she just wants to laugh. Gutfeld’s ascent is proof: if you take the comedy out of comedy, someone more irreverent, less filtered, and yes, often more abrasive, will fill the vacuum.

Why Did Jimmy Kimmel Stop Being Funny?

Late Night used to work because it punctured pomposity, whoever wore it. Today, the targets are selective and the arrows carefully aimed at only “acceptable” villains. The self-awareness, the old gleeful sense that anything could happen, is lost. Even the audience, Gutfeld fumes, “aren’t really laughing, they’re clapping because they’re supposed to.”

Maybe that’s why, for now, Gutfeld’s wild party beats Kimmel’s group therapy. It’s unpredictable, often disagreeable, above all else, it’s still alive—while Kimmel’s show feels like it’s still paying off a guilt debt for the jokes of years past.

The Future: Will Comedy Get Its Groove Back?

If this battle proves anything, it’s that viewers are tired of being told what’s good for them, politically or comedically. The hosts who manage to reconnect—who shock, cajole and entertain without lecturing—will own the future of late night.

Until then, as one war-weary humorist put it, “The punchline is this: if it feels like comedy is homework, you might be in the wrong classroom.”