'What you're left with is libertarianism': Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld on what guys like to read, what meth addicts do to toasters, and why liberals and conservatives are so annoying.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Interview

INSOMNIACS WHO channel surf to Fox News at 3 a.m. may think they have drifted off into a dirty, hilarious febrile dream. Instead of perky anchors and partisan shouters working over the headlines of the day, a pug-faced ne'er-do-well named Greg Gutfeld leads a modey crew of comics, C-list celebrities, and occasional reason editors through a running news-of-the-weird joke lest covering (in no particular order) free markets, unicorns, drug legalization, very attractive women, and very gay sex. Airing since February 2007, Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld is just the latest stop in Gutfeld's checkered career.

In 1987 Gutfeld took his first journalistic job, somewhat unconventionally for a Berkeley graduate, at the conservative American Spectator, running errands for the magazine's famously erratic editor in chief, R. Emmett Tyrell. After a failed stint as a screenwriter, Gutfeld got a job at the health-oriented lifestyle magazine Prevention, where he started drinking and drugging at a prodigious rate. Gutfeld went on to edit the lads-and-abs magazines Men's Health (where he was fired for making fun of Girl Scouts, cat lovers, and his boss), Stuff (where he was fired for an incident involving several midgets for hire at a publishers' conference), and finally the British edition of Maxim, where he hung his hat while writing Lessons From the Land of Pork Scratchings: A Miserable lank Discovers the Secret of Happiness in Britain (Simon & Schuster). Gutfeld has written "traitor" colunms for women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Mademoiselle, telling women what men really think. He claims to have been rejected for a job at reason in 1988.

In 2005 Guffeld gained a new audience by writing satirical, liberal-mocking posts at The Huffington Post (sample line: "Is Al Franken patenting the pubic hair and Elmer's glue cure for baldness, or is he just keeping the idea to himself?"). This helped lead him to his current gig, where in addition to hosting the hour-long Red Eye, he writes the Daily Gut blog. The unifying theme throughout his career has been boobs, as in both breasts and morons. Another theme to his jobs: Gutfeld was fired or forced to resign in disgrace from virtually all of them.

Associate Editor Katherine Mangn-Ward spoke with Gutfeld on stage at Reason Weekend in Orlando, Florida, in April.

reason: Describe the evolution of your political outlook.

Greg Gutfeld: As a teenager, I was a liberal. It helped me in school. Where I went to school, if you collected signatures for the nuclear freeze, you got extra credit. I realized the more you seemed to care about something, the more the teachers cared about you and your friends. If you share the liberal assumptions, you don't have to think too much about it.

I thought that was great because it really helped me with grades, but after a few debates in school where I actually had...