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Fox Host Jimmy Failla (fail-ah) will be dropping behind enemy lines, performing at the Shubert Theatre in Boston on Saturday, May 18th. Our publisher Lonnie Brennan had an opportunity to chat with Jimmy. We’re sharing excerpts of that conversation:

Lonnie: I don’t know if you know much about the background here, but eight and a half percent of the people are Republicans, 30% are Democrats, which means just about everybody wants nothing to do with either party, for good reason. So, it’s amazing the number of people, like I say, that are conservatives in hiding out there that subscribe to the paper and have kept us rocketing. So, I’m thrilled and honored to talk with you about this. So tell us about it: You’re about go behind enemy lines.

Jimmy: But as far as the whole mission, the enemy lines thing and everything like that, I always bill my TV show, the Fox News Saturday Night with Jimmy Failla, I’m telling people straight up: I say, this show is not the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, it’s the Keg Party.

The Keg Party, right now. If you were to look out at society, it’s largely conservative. And the reason I say that is because we’re the good-time party. We’re not censoring speech. We’re America. And that’s the coolest thing about talking to conservatives in Massachusetts. You guys, the 8% of you that are up there, you represent America. You want to hang out with “Marica.” Marica has beer, Marica has ribs, Marica has fireworks.

America are the people who get mad at you for cultural appropriation – having Taco Tuesday and you’re not Mexican – and nobody wants to that way. So, what my standup show is, when I’m on the road, especially when I am behind enemy lines like I will be at the Shubert, is I’m trying to remind everybody in the region which is the cooler side.

So, what I ultimately wind up doing is I’ll have liberals turn out because that’s just the demographics of the city, but they’ll come away from it with a different understanding of our party because our party doesn’t want to run their lives.

I always say we don’t want to own the libs. I say we don’t even want to rent the libs, and we can’t because they’re using their apartments as migrant shelters.

And I’m trying to show them there’s this way forward where we don’t have to be in this perpetual fight for power that’s going to give the winner total control over the other guy’s existence. We don’t represent that as conservatives, but I do feel the left is doing that. Whether it’s telling you what to drive or what you can be eating and what kind of stove you can be using in your house. There’s a lot more control on their side. So, if we were to break it down on those terms, the point of my show is to get everybody, I’ll say this, get everybody to chill the blank out. I basically run into town and try to get everybody to slap it down into second gear and listen to the engine winde a little bit as you pull up to the light.

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I’m excited. I like being the away team and I’ve been telling anybody that’ll have me that I view this gig as the Rocky 4 of standup shows.

Lonnie: Yeah, I caught that on Jim’s [Polito talk] show. I was laughing, I was cheering.

Jimmy: I dig it. It’s what it is. You’re flying out to Moscow on Christmas day. Everybody’s booing you in your American trunks, but they’re going to be cheering for you by the 10th round. That’s the goal of this show. And listen, I’m heartened to know that I’ll begin the show with 8% support, which is better than where Rocky started. I’m inspired. If I can change and you can change, everybody can change. Isn’t that what he says?

Lonnie: There you go – there’s an opportunity for us here to introduce you to some people who don’t know you. That’s the thing that happens all the time with the paper. We get calls every week, multiple times during the week, from folks who just saw our paper for the first time and they’re like amazed – in Massachusetts? And, similarly, they’ll be newbies coming to your show, people just recently introduced to you, and that’s the goal of writing this up: to encourage folks to bring a friend, bring a relative, have a good time.

Jimmy: That’s a good note. One thing I always tell people seeing me do standup or when I was pushing my book Cancel Culture Dictionary, I would say to people: Give this to someone who you don’t think would agree with it. It’s the best thing you can do at my comedy show is bring someone you don’t think would. They would be like: Are you kidding me? I don’t like that guy. Because most of people’s views of conservatives, most of people’s views of Fox are based on stories handed to them by people who don’t watch. You know what I’m saying? Yep, exactly. There’s so many people that’ll yell at you about Fox News. I’m like … we didn’t do that. Actually, that’s not what we did. And when they see me, because my whole vibe is I’m not like a culture warrior. I’m like the culture club. You know what I’m saying? I dressed like Boy George half the time.

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But the point is there’s a vibe at my show that it really does for everybody who consumes it, even if they’re hardcore conservatives, they come away feeling better about things. Because I’m basically – all I’m doing is giving out perspective.

I’m a guy who started as a cab driver and now through some spectacular confluence of events and a couple of low-level extortion attempts, I have my own TV show on the biggest channel on cable. And it’s a good empowering story. It’s good like an American success story, but gives me a lot of perspective because I’ve gotten to see society from this angle that a proctologist sees a patient from. I have an angle, multiple [angles], luckily others don’t get, but I’ve learned some things when I’ve put on that robe and gone under the microscope that people would benefit from knowing. And it’s not like political grievance. I’m really handing them: Cool, just be cool.

Do you remember in Pulp Fiction when Samuel Jackson is trying to – at the robbery – and he’s like, tell that bit to be cool. He’s like, I tell you, be cool. That’s all we’re trying to do, which is we’re trying to be the shepherd. We’re trying to be Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction. So laugh, we’ll take your briefcase, we’ll buy you a big kahuna burger.

Lonnie: Biden. He’s a topic on some of your shows. You haven’t had any uncles that have been eaten recently, have you? That was a bad joke to Biden.

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Jimmy: When we do my show, there’s a part of my show that is aimed at President Biden, and it’s good for liberals to hear this, that there’s a level of analysis that right now we’re being denied because everything in politics is like, well, should you vote for this? Or shouldn’t you vote for this? And that of course makes a lot of us retreat to our political side of the ring. But there are certain things going on in the middle of the ring that we should all be able to agree on.

If the president says his uncle got eaten by cannibals and he didn’t, you shouldn’t have to be a member of either party to acknowledge this is weird. OK? It’s like you shouldn’t look at that as a loss. – Well, I’m a liberal, so I’m not going to talk about it. Sorry. It’s a loss for us. – No, it’s a loss for you. If we sweep it under the rug, it’s fine. And we keep going because we’re going to wind up with a country where we actually become cannibals because the economy’s so bad. And that’s the point I think people are missing: There are obvious moments of shared humanity. It’s like I always tell people, I say, we shouldn’t be living in an America where we have a president who makes the sign language interpreter shrug.

That’s not normal. It’s not normal if you’ve never seen it before. I’ve never seen it before. And we shouldn’t pretend it’s normal because that’s how things go sideways.

So, I think the point of my show, especially if you’re coming up to the Shubert, is to remind people of this, a lot of, well, comedy does this better than anything. There’s so much more common ground than people realize. And it’s convenient for me to do this because most of the common ground are our core values as conservatives. We’re the adults in the room right now. I think that’s the easiest sale for our side, but even for the country, it’s just reminding people to be cool. Cool. You would absolutely, if you pulled America and you were like, who would you rather hang out with? Most people would rather hang out with us.

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Lonnie: Hey, just something that jumped into my mind here. This week’s been very active politically. We’ve got a lady who extorted a candidate running for the office of president – extorted him. She’s a prostitute and she extorted him, and his lawyer paid her off to go away, and now nine years later, he’s on trial.

How do you feel about good old Stephanie Stormy Daniels?

Jimmy: It’s weird, but being the true patriot that I am, I went out and researched her work to be ready for this interview, which I don’t advocate people to do on their work computers.

Lonnie: Oh my gosh! [laughing]

Jimmy: This is one of those stories where it really does show you how far out of touch the media’s priorities and the Democrats’ priorities are with everyday people. And what I mean by that is we know the story, we know what happened because it happened 10 years ago and the idea that they think anybody’s struggling to pay for groceries, anybody who doesn’t necessarily feel safe in their inner city these days – it’s all migrant crime and everything else – that the idea that anybody’s like, we will deal with that when we deal with that, but first, there’s a guy who shagged a girl 10 years ago, paid her by check when everybody knows Stormy Daniels should get paid by singles. I’m not going to have this. Let’s hold the whole country.

It’s one of those things where it gives you hope if you’re rooting for Trump to win, because they [the Democrats might have just taken their eye completely off the ball for the whole election cycle. Because as you can see, they’re running on January 6th. Nobody cares. Nope. I’m not saying it was the perfect day, but nobody cares. If you were to poll the average American about January 6th, the most shocking image you could show them is the price of gas that day. Seriously. The price of bread at a grocery store that day. If you showed them those January 6th images, they would be like, my God, we were paying $1.87 a gallon [for gas]. In New York City, when I go to a gas pump now, they don’t even have a price. There’s just a picture of the sex act you’re going to have to perform on the pump owner in order to get a gallon of gas. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. But anyway, stick with me here. So the point is, they’re going so heavily on Trump court cases and January 6th. The rest of the country is in the same position they were in 2016. And what I mean by that is in 2016 the media was like, oh, his tweets, his tweets, his tweets. But what the people were hearing was jobs, border security, NATO allies pay their fair share and some actual civic pride like America First, Mister Reagan.

Again, that really does resonate with people and I think that we’re uniquely positioned right now in this election where they’re trying to make a big deal out of all of this court stuff, but none of the court stuff affects the price of gas, the price of groceries, or the security of the border.

So, they’re going to harp on one thing all summer, but I genuinely don’t think the average voter cares because your opinion of Trump is so baked into the cake because he’s been a public figure for 40 years.

And that’s the other thing I just want to add is the left is living in their own manufactured hysteria. And what I mean by that is Trump was part of the fabric of America. No matter what you felt about the guy, he was hanging out with Oprah, he was hanging out with Barbara Walters, he was going on Howard Stern.

Lonnie: Everybody loved him, until that day.

Jimmy: Right. And he had his own show, The Apprentice. So, the idea when he entered politics that everyone on the left pretended this was a fringe lunatic who is with a bunch of skinheads in a shed, I’m like, are we just conveniently forgetting the last 40 years of our lives to accommodate this narrative? Oh, we are. And that’s what everyone did, and they played along. And what happened was they’re still living in that headspace, but to the rest of the world, they look nuts because they don’t realize. It’s like they’re like, if he gets elected, there won’t be elections, women won’t drive.

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Guys, newsflash: He was president once and none of that happened, and that’s the part that looks so crazy. So, I’m trying to give people perspective and comedy allows you to do that because when they’re laughing at something and instead of having it yelled at them, they’re more likely to process the data and agree with it.

Lonnie: Another aside, so you’ve got the wit of Bob Newhart, the classic doesn’t care who you splash of a Don Rickles. Explain that.

Jimmy: Well, thank you. And anyone who shows up to the Shubert has to know they’re going to SeaWorld. You’re all going to be in the splash zone. Republican, Libertarian, independent, Shamu is going to throw you a little spray.

Lonnie: And while splashing everyone, I’m sure you’ll share a bit about your backstory, the struggles you had. In a small way, we feel it. Going ten years growing a conservative paper with nothing, from scratch, with support coming from our readers and growing and growing slowly. You did the seven years in the cab. It’s an incredible story.

Jimmy: And I try to share my story with people also just to remind them about the possibilities of life here, because the moment we’re living in – as everybody is now kind of teaching people not to try. It’s like, yeah, let the government take care of it. Let the government forgive your loan. Right? I’m proof that if you can try, seriously, if I can accomplish what I’ve accomplished – and you can train an ape to host a TV show – so people should be inspired, man. Get out, go to work.

Lonnie: So, to wrap up, is it work or is it fun and work?

Jimmy: It’s just cool. You are trying to be a force multiplier of good, positive energy, and that puts your head in a space where you can deliver things in a funny way or a fun way. It’s the biggest thing, the biggest thing that what I do is just being in a good mood. It’s like comedy. You’ve got to harness a specific emotion. I would imagine if I was an adult dancer, I wouldn’t want to have a burrito before I got on stage. I might not feel as attractive.

Lonnie: All right. I got to go acid wash my eyeballs now just at the view. OK, but go ahead.

Jimmy: That’s funny. [laughing]. I laughed. I laughed. I thought you were funny. I got you.

We’re just trying to get people to have fun. I’m pumped up. I’m fired up for the Shubert, Rocky 4. Stallone is ready. I’m going to go listen to There’s No Easy Way Out, do some comedy and get up to the Shubert for the win.

Lonnie: I love it. I love it. I love it. Thank you for this.

Jimmy: It was great, man. Totally great. Hang.

I’ll be back in New York this week. So, you need anything, just follow up. I’m happy to help. Whatever way I can. This was great. I appreciate you having me. And like I said, check in if you need anything during the week.  ♦

TICKETS ON SALE NOW FOR AN INTIMATE SHOW AT THE SHUBERT THEATRE!  CLICK HERE TO GET THEM BEFORE THEY’RE GONE!!!