Presumably there are only so many times you can rerun “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Hannity and Colmes,” “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren,” “Special Report with Brit Hume,” and other Fox News staples into the small hours of the morning before even the most Fox-addicted insomniac says, “Enough! I’ve seen this program three times already!”

Either that, or a mistake has been made, because since its February 5 debut, “Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld” — not a news show so much as a jubilantly idiotic gab fest about whatever dumb stories happen to be in the headlines, and the dumber the better — is still hanging around on Fox at 2 a.m. to no apparent purpose.

Let’s start with the positives. If nothing else, “Red Eye” is a pretty good name for a television program. Aside from the obvious allusion to the overnight flight, the term can also be used for conjunctivitis, blurred vision, an alcoholic drink, a hangover remedy, a cup of coffee with a shot of espresso, and, as if all that weren’t enough, a Vietnam-era surface-to-air missile.

The show is a bit like watching a televised version of the goofiest parts of the Drudge Report and a collection of semiliterate blogs. (It’s Blog TV!) The host, 42-year-old Greg Gutfeld, is a former editor of Maxim and Stuff magazines. His name suggests someone who drinks too much beer and plans to go on doing so for a good long time. If he wasn’t on television, one could imagine him in a bar making a lot of noise.

On a recent episode, Mr. Gutfeld led a discussion about a town in Australia that has proposed a ban on drinking shots in bars, partly on the grounds that it makes people violent, and partly because people should drink “for taste, not for effect.” Raising a skeptical eyebrow, Mr. Gutfeld decided to test this politically correct notion on one of his guests, Doug Giles, author of the forthcoming “10 Habits of Decidedly Defective People: The Successful Loser’s Guide to Life.”

“Doug, has anyone ever drunk for taste?”

“Heck, no, man, it’s all for effect,” Mr. Giles replied gamely, muttering that if Australians were to ban anything, it ought to be kangaroos. It was more like listening to people talk in a living room — though not yours, thankfully — than in a television studio.

Mr. Gutfeld doesn’t pretend to be a polished TV host. He pretends to be an unpolished one. “‘Red Eye’ starts COW — whoops, I mean, NOW,” he’ll bellow into the camera to kick off the program. Then he’ll add an introductory remark for the uninitiated such as: “‘Red Eye’ is like ‘Lost’, except without all the sand.” He’s not sending up Fox News, or Mr. O’Reilly and co., so much as television itself — our need to watch it, his to be on it. It’s like a trashy magazine you pick up in the dentist’s office to while away the time, only it keeps reminding you that it really is trash. “Red Eye” even has its own “ombudsman,” Andrew Levy, who comes on to correct (often plentiful) factual errors in a barely discernible, sleep-deprived mutter.

Presumably, Mr. Gutfeld has the same ambition to be a megastar that burns in the breast of everyone else on television, but if so, he has the good taste not to show it. (That’s as far as his taste goes.) He has black hair, a stocky build, a slightly pugilistic stance (as if he expects someone to try to yank him off air at any moment), and doesn’t wear a tie. He has no real wit, no real talent, but is oddly likable because he doesn’t appear to care. All he wants to do is discuss ridiculous news stories, and this he does with gusto. You don’t imagine him reading a tabloid so much as tearing it apart with his teeth, the better to get at a story about, say, government-paid gender reassignment surgery in Berkeley.

He also has two of the oddest cohosts you’ll find on TV. One, Bill Schulz, is introduced as a “freelance writer” and, to his credit, few people have ever made “freelance” look more like a euphemism for “unemployed.” There are episodes when he says less than any co-host who receives a paycheck has a right to. His main job is to model every conceivable look of disdain while simultaneously registering a visceral distaste for the other co-host, Rachel Marsden, a conservative columnist for the Toronto Sun who looks like she could snap his neck in two seconds flat using only one of her two very long legs.

Ms. Marsden doesn’t say much either, mainly because Mr. Gutfeld rarely invites her into the conversation and treats her with mild contempt when he does. Her function seems to be to look sexy in a slightly overbearing way and be the sole standard-bearer of orthodox Fox News thinking, which is mostly verboten here. The same holds true for orthodox liberal thinking, and perhaps any kind of thinking at all. “Red Eye” is like “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” for drunk people, and there may even be executives at Fox who think that by airing it they’re out-hipping their tormentors on Comedy Central.

The most encouraging thing about the show, which typically ranges over such trashy fare as “The War on Strippers,” “Tranny Time,” a vibrator that’s been banned in Cyprus because it interferes with the military’s frequency, a defaced Rush Limbaugh poster considered as a work of art, and the naming of Drew Barrymore as the U.N. Ambassador Against Hunger (that’s all from one episode), is its anarchic air of freedom.

Now if only someone could come up with a talk show that combined that same sense of anarchy with more nutritious fare. Christopher Hitchens — a big catch by “Red Eye” standards — was on last Saturday to discuss his new book, “God Is Not Great,” but the segment was disappointing. Apart from the usual crew, Mr. Gutfeld’s guests that night included a former CIA agent and a Playboy cover girl, and it might have been interesting to watch them mix it up on the subject of the Deity. But Mr. Gutfeld soon had another segment to get to, just like any other TV host. Perhaps he’s a bit more conventional than he lets on? Could he secretly be lusting after the 1 a.m. slot, slowly inching his way toward prime time? Is “Red Eye” just a semiclever new angle on the talk show format, a ploy to get attention and critical plaudits by being weirder than everyone else? Probably, but it’s not a bad thing to have kicking around the airwaves, and its unpredictable politics, or complete lack thereof, are refreshing.

bbernhard@nysun.com