Rubbernecking for Jerry Springer

Jerry Springer is dead at seventy-nine. He had fantasized about his demise coming in his fifties. Judgment Day would take the shape of—what else?—a talk show, a reproduction of his program, “The Jerry Springer Show,” with Springer as guest, God at the mike. No hypocrite, a true believer in humiliation, Springer would offer his life up for final scrutiny.

Springer, a veteran of newscasting with many Emmys, licks his finger and the wind tells him, go outré. He had introduced his eponymous show, in 1991, as an issues-of-the-day digest—a natural roost for an erstwhile lawyer and politician with an arsenal of liberal bon mots. This first iteration was not remarkable, and so producers retooled, scripting the chaos we associate with Springer today. It drew millions of viewers. The show was more than popular, it was ubiquitous.

Was he serious? Springer could play mogul; he could play pariah. He played chief self-deprecator, lampooning himself and his industry in a 1998 film, also called “Ringmaster.” The readymade argument available to him was that his product was attuned to true normalcy. There is no exhausting of the Real America phantasm; it validates all kinds of business. The family was broken and may not ever have been coherent in the first place.

In the dedication to his memoir, Springer muses affectionately that his mother would hate his show. Margot Springer gave birth to her son in 1944, in a makeshift bomb shelter in the London Underground. The family, German Jews, settled in Queens, New York. Springer’s father, Richard, a salesman, reached middle-class security by founding a toy company; his most popular doll was the Emmett Kelly, fashioned after the sad likeness of the Depression-era drifter clown.

For those who know about it, Springer’s political career, first as a member of Cincinnati’s city council and then as the city’s mayor, from 1977 to 1978, is good fodder for the idea of

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