The Night That We... (were on television)

PART XXI
Jerry!(?) Jerry!(?)
February 2011

I was on Jerry Springer. I've already talked about this day a few times here on this blog (here, and here, for instance), so yeah, it was a big day in my life. Which is fucking stupid, when you think about it, and kind of embarrassing. I'm listing the most important days of my life. Some people, if they were doing a similar project, might list charity projects, family gatherings, true milestones. The event I've mentioned the most is a time I got drunk on national television. Stupid.

I'm here again to talk about it because recently, at a family-esque gathering, my parents brought out their old VHS copy of the Jerry Springer episode featuring me and my friends, and as we watched, my outlook on the whole event soured and curdled in my mind. I know this is probably exhausting at this point—wow, Joe K*** is yet again taking an extremely pessimistic look at an insignificant part of his life, how emo of him!—but this is one is actually worth explaining.

Because shit's changed since 2011, vastly. The world has changed, the cultural divide has deepened, my moral compass is a little more sensitive, and all that combined makes me question whether drinking a box of wine and then yelling on TV is something to celebrate or to be weary of.

Okay, let's talk about what exactly happened on that cold February day at the tail end of college. There's no need to be macabre when it comes to the tale; regardless of how I feel about the outcome now, the experience itself was a genuinely fun one.

Did you know that Jerry Springer will send a bus to your school and drive you to his show if you ask him? I didn't know this until my friend Jimmy send out a mass FB message that he had like 40 comped tickets to a Jerry Springer taping. Of course I was interested. The bus ride was free, the tickets were free, and the pizza served on the bus was free. All I had to do was skip a couple classes. My music teacher was a self-professed Jerry fan, and I honestly think my grade improved because I skipped his class for that reason.

It's a three and a half hour bus ride from Philadelphia, PA, to Hartford, CT, where Jerry Springer (and Maury, and Steve Wilkos, and etc.) is taped. That's a lot of time. Enough time to get drunk, for sure. You think bus drivers give a fuck about what's going on behind them? Nah man, they are concentrating on the road. They ain't got time to be yelling at legal adults for consuming adult beverages. Again, three and a half hours is a long time. My college friends have gotten drunk under way more trying circumstances. This is the same group of animals who play Hermit, a drinking game involving guzzling a half dozen beers in a dark room in under a half hour. Three hours on a bus was enough. All this suffice to say... we got fucking drunk.

I guess that's important to the story. I mean, it's a part of every goddamn story I tell here on PoYB, so this isn't unique in that sense. But it's important to set the stage, to paint a picture of privileged college kids acting obnoxious and going to see what basically amounts to being a circus.

I really shouldn't have to explain what the television program Jerry Springer itself consists of either. The show is ubiquitous in our culture, known well by people of all ages for its trashy displays of sexually deviant trailer park inhabitants. I will now briefly describe our particular taping and its stars, but in all honesty, it's a fill-in-the-blank endeavor. So-and-so cheated on whatshername, a third party arrives, they fist fight, and so on. It's all the same.

"I Got Side Action" is what they decided to call our episode, and true, all three stories involved people getting extra "action" from a third party without their significant other's knowledge or consent. I don't remember names, but even if I did, I would not degrade these people further by typing them here. There was a young man who was cheating on his older girlfriend with someone slightly closer to his age. There was a girl cheating on her man with a scrawny white kid because she felt he was there for her when her boyfriend wasn't. There was a guy cheating on his girlfriend with his male friend because he just wanted to have some fun and didn't see why this would get in the way of the relationship with his girlfriend. Tempers flared in all three segments. Weaves were ripped off. The scrawny white dude squared up in a lame attempt at defending himself, and got his ass beat for his troubles. The bloodthirsty crowd yelled "Jerry! Jerry!" at all the appropriate times. Like I said, you know how this works.

For as long as Jerry Springer has existed, there's been one question asked over and over. Are these people real, or just actors? Did this guy really volunteer to go on national television to talk about how he likes to shower with his best male friend, or was he plucked from a local theater production and given a check and told to play the part? It's almost too fantastical to believe (especially considering that most episodes of Jerry Springer are a hell of a lot wilder than "I Got Side Action").

I have no evidence either way—I didn't talk to any of the show's participants after the show or anything like that—but I have a theory about it. Consider that most of the participants are ostensibly from poor, rural areas. Consider that, if Springer comped the audience's bus ride and tickets, how much the participants must get comped. Consider how appealing a (free!) weekend in a "big city" might be to some of these folks. The dozens of people who have posed the question to me over the years were all upper-middle class white folks who can't possibly comprehend (I include myself in this) that circumstances would be so dire that you might consider a weekend in Hartford talking about your cheating girlfriend to be a VACATION OF A LIFETIME. If you typically work weekends at a Waffle House in Bumfuck, Iowa, then admitting that you slept with a stripper is a small price to pay for a free vacation, right?

But of course, if these people truly are real people, and not actors, as I am theorizing, then the catch is that they were clearly still directed to do and say certain things during the show. The producers want maximum drama. I can see a stage director maybe telling a participant: "Hey, if your girlfriend says something snarky, here's a great comeback you can use..." Or: "Make sure you wait till the other guys says something shitty to you; once that happens, maybe that would be a good time to throw a punch."

And, yes, I can confirm that we in the audience were real. I am not a paid actor. But even we were very tightly directed to do and say certain things. Again, I was pretty loaded, but I recall that there was a certain hand signal that would indicate when we could and could not yell the "Jerry!" chant. The laughs, the oooohs, the gasps, they were off the cuff, but c'mon, they might as well have been scripted. Even some of the audience participation lines at the end were fed to the audience (mine was a Joe K*** original, but more on that soon).

My point is that these were very real people, all of us, on stage and in the theater, all real, but all playing a part in the magic of carefully constructed television programming.

Having been privy to the behind-the-scenes workings of Jerry Springer on that day seven years ago, I have always focused on how fake it was. There's not anything wrong with that—you don't see me bitching about how, like, Westworld is fake or anything. In fact, in concentrating on the artificial nature of Jerry Springer, I allowed myself to forgo any feelings of shame or regret in my behavior. That's not me, that's just "TV me."

But watching the episode again the other day, for the first time in years, I was struck painfully with the realization that, no matter how manufactured the drama, these were real fucking people we were laughing at and poking fun at. The reasoning behind their willing participation in the shenanigans is irrelevant. No one deserves to get shit on like that, especially people who are clearly feel so low in life already. It's like we, the audience, were laughing and throwing rotten fruit at human beings in cages, and were supposed to think that behavior was okay just because Jerry Springer was there too, throwing cash around, telling us it's okay.

I've always been a little uneasy with the crack that I made at a guest, the one that got me on national television, even before I watched it again with eyes wide open. Were there racist undertones in what I said? I didn't intend it as such, I swear on my life, but I could see how one could interpret it as such.

I directed my joke at the guy who cheated on his girlfriend with another girl for seemingly no reason. He was young black kid, about two years younger than I was at the time, and, despite his love for basketball (he was his team's manager), he was pretty short. So my roast went as follows: "My question is for the short basketball manager. I have to say, I've been having trouble understanding what you've been saying, so my question is, WHATCHYU TALKIN' 'BOUT, WILLIS?!" Cue audience laughter.

There's nothing blatantly racist about my statement, sure. But I guess at this point, my feelings on the matter are that if you have to explain why you are not racist, then you are probably racist. I was a privileged white dude taking a shit on some unassuming black dude on national television.

On top of that, I was rewarded for my joke. I was told I had the best insult of the day, and thus, was allowed to introduce the commercial break, which I did so with great inebriated gusto: "We'll be right back with JERRY'S FINAL THOUGHTS."

Here in 2018, viewing the tape again, the yelling didn't seem like the victory it once was. Now I just feel bad for the guy, and I feel bad for myself. It didn't help that the group I was watching the videotaped episode with were treating the experience like they were watching a spectacle of freaks, with a dash of that classic good ol' Northeast Philly racism thrown in. There were gasps in the living room when a large black woman appeared on screen, for no other reason other than she was large and black. The weave-ripping interlude was treated with truly contemptuous ridicule, not the intended lighthearted ridicule. Not only was the scrawny white kid a loser, but so too was the black guy defending his own honor.

I don't want to overstate the situation during this recent viewing. The people I was watching the tape with are not overt racists. But I'm sensitive to that fucking bullshit nowadays that even the suggestion of racism makes my skin crawl. And again, if you have to explain why you aren't racist... you're probably racist.

Okay, I'm kind of losing the thread here. It's just, I felt a lot of things, watching that video again. I felt indignant, that these people were treated like assholes because of their economic class or intelligent level or color of skin or a combo of all three. I felt embarrassed that I had played right into it, feeding the hate, adding my own mockery, for all to see, on national television. I felt sympathy for these people, that they were in a position in their lives that they wanted to put their warts on display for whatever supposed reason.

Like I said, though, these feelings were new to me, because it was the first time I was truly considering the humanity behind the facade of trashy daytime programming. Were we all—the participants, the audience members, Jerry himself—were we all just playing the part? Were we characters on a stage, reading the script? Or are these actual real people with feelings? How much of this is truly real?

Since I re-watched the tape a few weeks ago, I've been thinking a lot about that short basketball manager. I wonder how he feels about the whole situation. I wish there was some way I could reach out to him, to just get on the same page. Insulting someone's height isn't the most sadistic thing you can do to a person, but getting a whole room of people to laugh at you in unison might be close to it. I often wonder if he regrets being there on stage and having some tall drunk elf spew garbage at him. If I were him, I probably would.

I dunno, maybe I'm taking all this way too seriously. Maybe it really is all just a bluff. Maybe the short basketball manager was a paid actor. Maybe some days he doesn't even remember that he was once on Jerry Springer. I have no fucking clue, really.

It's important to me, though, to consider and reconsider and reconsider and reconsider my actions throughout my life. And these days, when children are literally being put in cages in American concentration camps, it's especially important to consider in what ways I put other people in cages (figuratively). I am so bad at it sometimes, but I'm working on how to put more love into the world. More love, as opposed to more, say, drunken (possibly racist) height jokes.