He never got personally involved, which was soothing - you knew nobody was getting hurt on his watch. Oprah and Jerry were America’s good-cop/bad-cop TV therapists - she was into conciliation he provided a safe space for chaos. As with pro wrestling, America liked the violence better that way. The fact is, nobody felt disillusioned - people liked the idea that the show was full of fakery. There was zero controversy about this revelation. She even coaches him on how to jump out of his chair fast enough to dodge the security goons. In the mind-blowing Rolling Stone cover story, a producer coaches a guest backstage, sketching out his whole tantrum in advance. People always assumed the brawls were scripted. See Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers Perform 'Nothing New' Together at Nashville Show To his shock - along with everyone else’s - it blew up like crazy in the late Nineties. He went from politics to TV news, then got hired to do a talk show. Many politicians sneak around with sex workers, but only this one would get busted paying with a personal check. He also had a very Springer kind of sex scandal in 1974. (“Today’s show: Acid, Booze, and Ass Needles, Guns, and Grass Lot of Laughs.”) Tragically, we never got a Joni episode of Springer. Springer was a hipster mayor, posing with visiting rock stars like Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, and Joni Mitchell. He was a lawyer and politician who became mayor of Cincinnati in the 1970s - a Jewish liberal in the city that voted against FDR all four times. Both of his grandmothers died in the concentration camps. He came to America in 1949 as a five-year-old immigrant with his family of German-Jewish refugees after the Holocaust.

Roseanne Barr famously said at the time that Jerry Springer was the first Jewish man to become America’s rabbi. Jerry summed up his show in a classic 1998 Rolling Stone cover story, at his peak: “It’s chewing gum, it’s silly, it’s outrageous, it’s stupid, it’s a spoof, it’s a fraternity party on the air, it’s crazy.” He loved to boast that he would never watch his own show. He did not give the Oprah “I feel your pain” eyes or the Phil Donahue “Aaaw, what a shame” brow or the Ricki Lake “I’m so horrified” face-palm. Jerry was not like other talk-show hosts. You felt cheated if you watched an episode where nobody got into a brawl. His eponymously titled show was a beautifully bizarre pageant of dysfunctional American life: You watched strangers sit down onstage, listened to them confess horrible betrayals, and waited for them to lunge out of their chairs and scream. This man revolutionized daytime TV - he was the Martha Graham of afternoon talk-show slap-and-punch choreography. to the great Jerry Springer, who died Thursday at 79.

The stone of farewell