“I’ve got tits. I’ve got fucking tits.”

Greg Gutfeld, host of Fox News’ bawdy, blogger-friendly 2 a.m. chatfest Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, was smoking outside the Landmark Tavern in Hell’s Kitchen on a recent Sunday night and talking about the changes wrought on his physique since his TV show debuted in February.

“I’ve completely stopped exercising,” he continued. “I have not thought about going to a gym. My diet has gone to hell; I smoke more. I don’t think my drinking has gotten worse; it’s just more intense. I need it—and I’ve never needed it. The one thing I hate about it is, the people around you, who you love, you end up being kind of mean to them. Because you feel they don’t understand. And it’s a very wrong kind of thing.”

Back when Mr. Gutfeld, 42, was editing Men’s Health (fired), Stuff (kicked upstairs) and Maxim UK (contract not renewed), he’d get up at 5:30 a.m. and work out. “You could be as vain and self-absorbed as you wanted,” he said. “I had like 2 percent body fat. I was insane, and I realized I just wasn’t happy. Or something.”

Mr. Gutfeld had been drinking beer since 3 p.m. and had moved on to vodka. Behind his black-framed glasses, his blue eyes were bloodshot. Soon he’d be going home to his two-bedroom co-op and his wife, Elena Moussa, a 25-year-old Russian beauty he met in London.

If Red Eye isn’t quite Fox’s answer to The Daily Show—that distinction belongs to Fox’s truly awful The ½ Hour News Hour—the show’s giddy roster of New York–area media stars and camera-craving bloggers, who are probably unknown and unattractive to the vast majority of Fox viewers, is evidence that Fox wishes to make itself a respectable place to do business for the next-generation New York media elite.

While the show runs largely on jokes, riffs and loopy news bits, it’s prevented from relaxing too much into apolitical anarchy by the hand of Fox News president Roger Ailes, who dropped sultry conservative Toronto Sun columnist Rachel Marsden smack in the middle of the merry band of pranksters to make it clear that politics with a rightward bent is still the Fox brand, particularly if it arrives on long legs.

So far, about 300,000 viewers are tuning in to the show, which is taped at 8:40 p.m. and airs at 2 a.m. The format is unscripted. In the studio with Mr. Gutfeld are his sidekick, Bill Schulz (a Muppet-like fellow that Mr. Gutfeld described as “the funniest person I’ve ever met in my life”); the coltish (and Coulter-ish) Ms. Marsden; and guests, who recently have included gadfly Christopher Hitchens, comic Jackie Mason, blogger Rachel Sklar, Fox News correspondent Laurie Dhue and redneck comedian Larry the Cable Guy. The topics whiz past—most segments barely last a minute. Mr. Gutfeld has a stack of blue cards with things written on them such as “woman’s severed finger found in purse,” and he’ll toss the conversational ball around.

“I feel like I’m a lion tamer holding chain saws,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “Because I want to say something funny, but I’m too busy going, O.K., what do I do next?” The surreal feeling of the show blends into the type of commercials running at that insomniac hour—Vermont Teddy Bears, adjustable beds, giant tomatoes.

“It’s somewhat similar to somebody who’s lost his mind,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “Because I’m a complete maniac. You may disagree with me, but you can’t stop watching …. I don’t even think you have to like the show to get sucked in.”

“You almost feel like you’re going out and not going out,” said VH1 contributor Michelle Collins. “It’s like being at a bar with your friends and hearing all their opinions—while laying in bed eating Snackwell cookies.”

While Mr. Gutfeld tries to keep the show from idling too long on partisan territory (“They get that 23 hours a day”), his own politics are fairly at home on Fox. He dismisses liberalism as “romantic notions that are false, based on the idea of making yourself look good to other people. That’s why most men—Bill Clinton is a good example—are liberal, because they need to get laid. If you look at most left-wing guys, they’ve made a deal with the devil. They don’t really believe that shit—they’re going against their own innate nature, because liberalism is anti-man. If you believe that peace and love work, you’re not a man, because this world works on war. The only people who respect you are people who are scared of you—and that’s why Reagan was a great President. And the idea that you can negotiate with people who want you dead is a complete lie. That’s why the left is the most self-absorbed, vanity-driven enterprise. These are people who would rather feel good about themselves at a cocktail party that actually protect people’s lives. If you’re at a party and you say, ‘The war on terror is the most important thing in the world’—you won’t get a nod. But if you say, ‘Global warming is the biggest threat,’ you will get laid.”

Jon Stewart?

“His show is an arena built on self-congratulation,” said Mr. Gutfeld. “He meets his audiences’ assumptions, and that makes them feel good. And I think that’s weak. At times he’s funny, but that’s the easiest job in the world—to show up and have people kiss your ass.”

Mr. Gutfeld’s journey from lad-magazine editor to Fox personality happened the way Fox does a lot of things—quickly and without much fuss. Last summer, after his contract at Maxim UK wasn’t renewed, he was living in London, writing for The American Spectator and drinking.

He flew to Los Angeles to visit his friend Andrew Breitbart, a regular contributor at the Drudge Report. Over dinner, a guy from Fox News told Mr. Gutfeld about a new show. “I was drunk enough to say, ‘I’ll be the host!’” said Mr. Gutfeld. “I never probably would have said that otherwise. It was still a vague idea. They didn’t know what they wanted, but they knew that they wanted something.”

He flew to New York and met with Fox News producer John Moody and Fox News president Roger Ailes. “[Ailes] liked me and asked me how much I was making,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “I said, ‘It’s not important—working at Fox is a perfect fit for me, because I’m an outsider and Fox is an outsider.’ In some bizarre way, I charmed them into letting me do this.”

In January, he and his wife moved to New York. He still hadn’t been told by Fox what to do with his show, which was premiering in two weeks.

“All I could think of was, when I worked at Stuff and Maxim, the best part of the day was when I would just stand there and yell at everybody,” he said. “That’s the only thing I know how to do well: stand and yell at people.”

And so he started the routine he still follows. His alarm clock goes off at 10 a.m., and he gets on the Internet in search of stories. He goes to Google News and plugs in words such as “naked,” “deviant” and “strippers.” He gets to his office by noon and holds an ideas meeting. After he and two producers map the show, about 25 stories go into a lineup that is posted on a computer server, so everybody appearing on that night’s show can see it. After recording a cold opening, Mr. Gutfeld hangs out in his office and waits.

“Every day, you know you can do this thing,” he said. “And you’re not nervous when you’re doing it. But you’re nervous from 4 o’clock to 8—nervous that I’m going to fuck up.”

His on-air persona celebrates the pose of the fuck-up. Mr. Gutfeld’s previous boss, Felix Dennis, chairman of Dennis Publishing, once gave him a poem he’d written called “The Fool.”

“I go, ‘Man, that’s me!” Mr. Gutfeld said. “Once you decide that you are an idiot or fool, you have the ultimate freedom to do whatever you want. It actually allows you to be smarter …. I’ve been a fool all my life.”

Greg Gutfeld grew up in San Mateo, Calif. He was an altar boy at St. Gregory’s Catholic school, where he was the smartest kid in class, until an “incredibly handsome” and equally smart boy arrived.

“So I sat there going, ‘My power is gone,’” Mr. Gutfeld recalled. “Being a top student wasn’t working. I was in a classroom, and I was surrounded by people I could no longer control—and I made a joke and everybody laughed, and that was the moment I thought: I’m pretty shy, but I have this thing—I can manipulate people by saying funny things. And at that point, the doors opened.”

He idolized Hollywood Squares fixture Paul Lynde.

“You had no idea what his sexuality was, and he was the funniest, most interesting person on the planet, because he didn’t ascribe to any kind of male role,” said Mr. Gutfeld. “All you knew was, ‘That person’s funny.’ I fucking loved Paul Lynde. I think it was the element of the mystery—that he didn’t act like a normal man made it even funnier, but you didn’t know why. Gay comics you didn’t know were gay, but you knew that they were it. Truman Capote on Mike Douglas? Who is this person?”

At his grandmother’s house, he loved watching Carol Burnett, Laugh-In and the Dean Martin roasts. “I wanted to be the person there that makes the joke,” he said. “When I was sick, my mom would always bring home Mad magazine and National Lampoon and make me a milkshake.”

He said he was somewhat “acerbic” at school—never a bully, but often accused of being one.

“I wasn’t trying to make a joke about somebody being fat,” he said. “Even my closest friends I would make fun of, because I liked them. And they would go home to their parents and say, ‘Greg said this really awful thing,’ and I thought, ‘No, he’s my best friend.’ But I made my best friend cry.”

He got along best with mentally challenged kids.

“In class, I was always bored,” he said, “because my sisters had already taught me to read. So, at recess, I hung out with people who were really mentally disabled and very aggressive. They had what you call ‘retard strength.’ I found their energy interesting. And because I would gravitate toward them, they were fine with me.”

When he was 9, his father, Jack Gutfeld, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer (he would die when Greg was a sophomore in college).

In seventh grade one day, Greg broke his glasses, and his teacher wouldn’t let him sit up front to read the chalkboard. “I said, ‘If I flunk this test, I’m going to kick your ass’—so I got suspended,” he said. “My dad was still pretty healthy—and I didn’t know until two weeks later—he drove to the school, grabbed the teacher, threw him against a car and told him to leave me alone.”

In ninth grade, Greg set off fireworks in a classroom. This time, he was asked to leave St. Gregory’s.

“I said, ‘I can’t—I’m student-body president,’” he recalled. “They said, ‘You have two weeks left before school ends—just don’t come back.’ It was at that point I realized that I wasn’t growing.”

He attended an all-boys high school and got into punk rock thanks to his three older sisters, who turned him on to the Ramones. He went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he joined the Sigma Chi fraternity, thereby making himself a target during a “Women Take Back the Night” march. “I’m just walking along and I’m getting yelled at!” he said. “And it’s like, ‘I didn’t do anything!’ I’ll never forget that. You were in a trench, people hated you—living in a fraternity made you a hated person, and I didn’t even like fraternities.”

There were dates with Berkeley lefty chicks. “The conversation would invariably head toward abortion,” he said. “I would say, ‘I don’t give a damn if you had an abortion or not, but you killed the kid.’ If you can acknowledge that, I can deal with it. But if you can’t acknowledge that, and you dress it up in pro-choice bullshit, that’s a problem for me …. And I always knew I was diminishing my chances of getting laid.”

In 1985, a fraternity brother gave him an issue of the conservative American Spectator. “I thought, “My God, there’s something out there that I understand.”

Mr. Gutfeld’s nickname was “Butt-head.” “He used to get drunk and rage away,” said a frat brother, Bruce Owen. “Rapping at the top of his lungs. Scary shit. He was president and led the charge to steal some bus benches.”

“I got into rap very early,” said Mr. Gutfeld. “I could do every N.W.A song by heart. I got into a lot of fistfights because I was always drunk. I learned to fight at some point, probably because I was short.”

One summer, some female students from Brown University rented the Sigma Chi house; Mr. Gutfeld was the landlord. “They were the most miserable group of girls ever,” he said. One of the girls expressed romantic interest in a long-distance runner named Craig. Mr. Gutfeld, appropriating the plot of the book Alive, told the girls that Craig had once been in a plane crash in the Andes and had to eat some of his teammates.

“They were aghast,” he said. The next day, he enlisted a friend to run down the frat stairwell screaming that there’d been an accident: A pledge had fallen to his death. Mr. Gutfeld was in a room with the Brown girls. “I said, ‘Shit! Shit!’ And then I said, ‘Let’s get Craig!’ The girls were like, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘He’ll eat him! He’ll eat him!’” The girls moved out.

After he graduated in 1987, he received an internship at The American Spectator as assistant to R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., the magazine’s founder. Mr. Gutfeld opened Mr. Tyrell’s mail, got him lunch and spotted him while they lifted weights together. “I kept my mouth shut and listened,” he said.

One day, Mr. Tyrell said to him, “Reagan’s coming—I need you to mow my lawn,” recalled Mr. Gutfeld. “So I went to his house in McLean, mowed his lawn, washed his windows. And I said, ‘Could I meet Reagan?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’ It was a fair trade—I would have fucking cleaned the toilets.

“I’m standing there and there’s this motorcade, and I turn to look and say something—and Reagan is standing next to me,” he said. “He wasn’t in the main car. It was like seeing someone in a Reagan mask. When you see Reagan, you think it’s somebody in a Reagan mask. I remember saying nothing but gibberish. After Reagan left, they were clearing the dishes, and I got Reagan’s dish, and he hadn’t eaten all of his chicken. So I ate all his chicken.”

Mr. Gutfeld was broke, so he applied for a job at Rodale Press’ Prevention magazine. “I met the editor—I had no interest in health, I’d misspelled his name—and he hired me,” he said. He moved up the Rodale ladder: After four years at Prevention, he became a staff writer at Men’s Health, then editor in chief in 1999. He was fired a year later: “I put out amazing magazines, but they wanted Dave Zinczenko to be editor—he’s the perfect face for that magazine.”

The same month he was canned, he was offered a job as editor in chief of Stuff. Over the next three years, circulation increased from 750,000 to 1.2 million. “People thought of it as a lad mag, but the writing was as good as anything on Letterman,” he said.

In 2003, he hired several dwarves to attend a magazine conference, on the topic of “buzz,” in his place. During one of the lectures, they chatted loudly on cell phones and munched potato chips. “The midget thing got me in trouble” he said. “And the reason I didn’t tell anybody about it in advance is because then it wouldn’t have happened. I thought it made perfect sense: There’s a conference on ‘buzz’ by a bunch of self-congratulating idiots—I’ll show you buzz.”

He was kicked upstairs at Dennis and given the title of “brand development.”

“Every time I lost a job, I felt miserable—but something always would happen,” he said. “And I’m a difficult person for people to say, ‘That’s the guy we want.’ I don’t know what makes people do that …. I think there’s a romantic inclination from the people who hire me: They like that I don’t give a shit. And then, at the end of the day, they have to fire me.”

Dennis Publishing didn’t leave him upstairs for long: They tapped him to be the editor of Maxim UK, where he met the photo editor of Maxim Russia, Ms. Moussa. He proposed three months later.

Mr. Gutfeld said that before his stint in London, he’d always been unhappy in New York, because of the relentless pursuit of happiness.

“That’s what you do, but no one’s happy here,” he said. “So if you show up at a restaurant, you expect good service—and when it’s not good, you’re angry. In England, you expect bad service—and when it’s bad, you’re fine. And it’s because it’s a country that has already lost, and they don’t care. Being in England is like being dead. If there is such a thing as heaven, heaven is the end of competition, where you just throw up your hands and go, ‘It’s over!’”

In England, he said, “A guy will come up to you and say, ‘You know what you should do? You should go to Essex.’ And you’ll say, ‘Why?’ And he’ll say, ‘You’ll love it—it’s crap.’ Someone else will say, ‘Oh, no, you should go to Birmingham. You’ll love it.’ And you’ll say, ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s crap.’ And I didn’t understand this—and then I did go, and you realize, ‘This is crap, but I’m having a really good time.’”

He swore he didn’t meet a single unhappy person in England. “The assumption is, life doesn’t get any better than what you’re doing,” he said. “There is no guy next to you who you have to compete with. In New York, it doesn’t matter how much money you make—if you’re making a half-million, there’s a guy making a million, or eight billion. And you can tell that even those guys aren’t happy.”

After a recent Friday-night taping, Mr. Gutfeld was at Rosie O’Grady’s on West 46th Street. There were about 15 people sitting around the table—including the guests from that night’s show: Mike Baker, a former C.I.A. operative; Kevin Godlington, a former British Special Forces soldier; sex writer Julia Allison; and VH1’s Michelle Collins. Almost everyone was drunk. After someone told a joke about Mr. Gutfeld in bed with a donkey, he headed to the bar.

The show had been a good one—they’d riffed on Paris Hilton’s jail time, an Australian woman who wanted human rights for her monkey, the budding friendship between a puppy and a duck in China, actress Julie Delpy’s remark that the French really do stink, and Tyra Banks’ complaint that there are no African-Americans on Girls Gone Wild.

At the bar, Ms. Allison was wearing a short pink skirt suit. Would the show be around in a year?

“Absolutely,” she said. “But because the show is so loose, and because we have such a media-watchdog culture—they could get burned like that. Two words: Don. Imus. You don’t know what’s going to piss people off. And, my God, the shit that we get into—the sex, the bestiality—holy crap! I can’t believe that shit is on Fox News!”

The room was getting raucous. Mr. Gutfeld had to be up early and got ready to leave. I remembered what he’d said another night, when I asked him what it was like to go home to his wife, Ms. Moussa.

“It’s really bad,” he said, “because she is excited to see me, and my brain is in another place. I can’t watch the show unless I’m drunk, and my poor wife will come to me and say, ‘Look what I bought today—isn’t it nice?’ And I can’t deal with it. And then I’ll wake up at 5 a.m. with a thought about the show. But you know you’re doing something you love if you don’t have an appetite and you can’t sleep.”

He said one night a crew member took a piece of black tape and put it around Mr. Gutfeld’s finger. “He said to me, ‘Listen—when you go home and see your wife, you look at that black tape and think, “That’s where the show is.” When you look at that, you don’t talk about the show. You don’t bring that crap home.’ I had that piece of tape on for one day, but it fell off.”