Springer takes us to the dark side

The Herald's Ten Favorite Jerry Springer Topics

Jer-ry! Jer-ry!

Chairs sail through the air, wigs fly off, breasts are exposed, guys named "Lester" and "Rusty" unload on one another. And in the center, presiding over it all, is one man -- former mayor of Cincinnati, Emmy-winning journalist, lawyer, father, and all-around nice Jewish boy: Jerry Springer.

The Jerry Sprin-ger Show, as pretty much everybody knows by now, is the bottom of the barrel of sleaze TV--a televised dumpster filled to the brim with white trash. With topics like "My Sister Slept with My Three Husbands!", "I'm Proud to be a Racist!", and "Teenage Call Girls!", Jerry has managed to lower the standard not only of talk shows, but of American culture as a whole. The spectacles he stages are the millennial equivalent of public disembowelments in tsarist Russia.

And now, for a mere $19.95, all the more explicit moments of catharsis that Jerry never got to air are available in one nipple-intensive volume: Jerry Springer: Too Hot for TV! And, without a doubt, these moments are as truly unbelievable as their advertisements claim they are.

Two men wearing wigs, fake beards, and pink sweatsuits have an incredibly violent lovers' quarrel; an obese woman makes a Kyle McLachlan-lookalike lick Reddi-Whip off of her pontoonlike breasts; another, even more ridiculously obese woman wallops her mother upside the head with a handful of mashed potatoes.

For the most part, the people who fight are even more outrageous than the fights themselves: the men all look like Seattle Mariners pitcher Randy Johnson, and the women all look like they've been bearing children every nine months, on schedule, since they were twelve.

The best part of the video's format is that the clips are presented completely out of context. We never get to really meet any of the guests; all we get is pure violence, pure human misery...and pure entertainment. People we don't know enter the studio, sucker-punch, bitch-slap, and occasionally bite each other, and then leave. The viewer never gets the chance to give a crap about anyone's problems; he just watches a set of incredibly pissed-off hicks rassle and then watches another set of pissed-off hicks rassle. It rocks.

Of course, there's more than just fighting: there's also plenty of gratuitous nudity. Strippers come out, rub oil, paint, or dessert toppings over their big fake breasts, and then leave. One "dancer" even allows guys to squeegee mud off of her ass.

Even worse than the surgically weird bodies of the strippers, though, are the unenhanced bodies of the weirdos who decide to display their decidedly homely wares on syndicated television. Their cottage-cheese thighs, sagging bosoms, and shaky buttocks are more emetic than aphrodisiac. Titillating this stuff ain't.

Jerry never gives the impression of being in control of any of this. He lets his beefy security guards break up the scuffles, and is usually content with making a quip. Occasionally, he just sits in the aisle, head in hands, expression of mock disbelief on his face, an object of the audience's pity.

At the end of the video, of course, he gives his trademark Final Thought--a little oration designed to make the viewer feel as though the previous hour had been an intellectual experience--on the topic of The Jerry Springer Show's place in society. "TV does not, and must not, create values," he says, "and just think how boring life would be without outrageousness."

The funny thing is, as banal as he is, he's right. Without Springer, all of our winter breaks would have been a hell of a lot more boring; without this video, the 43 minutes of my life between 1:22 p.m. and 2:05 p.m. would certainly have been less exciting. Jerry Springer: Too Hot For TV! is everything it wants to be: sleazy, horrible, and fantastically entertaining.

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