#10 – Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

The late style of Jerry Springer

A month ago, more or less, I handed in my PhD thesis after four and a half years. I have a lot to say about the process, but it feels premature to write it before the defending and the graduating and all the other bits and pieces that string academic life out into the future. For now however, I am free. Without this big project hanging over me, I should have a little more time to dedicate to writing. If you’ve ever been tempted to commission me, to write or edit or anything else, now would be a great time.

Jerry Springer died a few days ago. He was 78, which seems too young. Both too young to die, and a little younger than I thought he was. He had one of those capacious lives, with so many aspects that feel incongruous to anyone under 40, but sort of make sense to pensioners. Born in a tube station during the blitz! Mayor of Cincinnati! Worked for Robert Kennedy! Life is long. My wife had a sort-of ancestor who at various times owned a minor league baseball team and was mayor of Globe, Arizona.

I haven’t got much to say about Springer, or his legacy, but I did once see him live. In 2012, living in New York on a J1 visa, I accompanied a group of friends to a taping of his legendary TV bearpit Jerry Springer, an institution as old as I was, 21.

Jerry Springer began life in Chicago, but by the time we went, it was being filmed in Stamford, Connecticut, alongside The Steve Wilkos Show and Maury. If you’ve ever watched someone be declared to be/not to be the father, it’s a good chance it was there. We journeyed up there on Metro North, a rail service that traveled slower than a sleeper train in northern Vietnam I once took. Stamford was joyless, in the manner of mid-sized American cities, and we were hungover. I don’t remember the original impetus for going, other than we vaguely thought it would be funny. It was not.

In the nineties, Jerry Springer was, if you’ll pardon the cliche, a genuine cultural phenomenon. He didn’t create the trash talk show, but he perfected it. I’m the youngest of four siblings, and as such often find my cultural reference points a few years behind people my age. You don’t get to decide what’s on the TV, and you better believe you’re sitting in the middle seat until some time in middle age. I don’t really remember many of the storylines on the show – I believe there was a man married to his horse at one point – but the feel of it is so specific and powerful. To call it in bad taste would be beside the point, and also correct, but more than that it was a sense that genuinely anything could happen. There’s a reason that clips from these shows, some of them thirty years old, constantly get churned back up into the culture. The specific blend of reality and fiction at play created moments that can still shock and amuse, even as the clothes, the hair, the very energy of the room become more and more obscure.

If you’ve never been in the audience for a live taping, you’ve never experienced one of the worst forms of human interaction: the warm-up. A steroidal-looking hype man appeared to explain the call and response nature of the show. When they wanted applause, they would ask for it, when they wanted boos, well, it would be pretty clear. Jerry was next, looking far older than late sixties. He delivered, in a flat, quiet monotone, jokes about Bill Clinton and the Macarena, touchstones from an era in which the show had been relevant. The jokes were old enough to be unsettling, as if a friend was telling a story so obtuse and incoherent that you suspected they were having a manic episode. They film several episodes of chat shows in one day, so the host is constantly changing shoes and shirts to provide the illusion of time passing. As a live audience member this feels like a strange ritual of deliberately inserting continuity errors.

The stories themselves were too depressing and quotidian to recount at length. Infidelity, addiction, incarceration, without the bizarre or taboo-breaking interest that provided a reasonable cover in the nineties. There was no sense of mischief or shockingly outré politics, no ambition to disabuse polite society of its pretensions, only a steady stream of human misery and a crowd of people with little else to do on a weekday morning but be there to witness it.

Including us, of course. The queasy feeling didn’t leave me for weeks. I clung to the fact that when the hype man instructed us to chant abuse at the guests, we declined, becoming only mute witnesses. Afterwards we sat in a Subway sandwich shop with a few other audience members, and to distract myself from the mounting horror I successfully convinced one guy that it was a treat getting to order goats cheese on my sandwich, given that goats had been outlawed in Ireland after the disastrous goat flu epidemic of 2003.

The nineties of Jerry Springer in some ways felt more distant in 2012 than they do now, in the way that clothes of ten years ago feel more dated than those of thirty. I consider it a minor personal failing of mine that I can never entirely shake the need to be in a “cool” place from my head. This is not to say that I spend my life hanging out at Brooklyn warehouse raves or art gallery openings (they wouldn’t have me even if I wanted to), but only that I have an acute and unsettling sense for when I’m somewhere that time has passed by. Somewhere that used to be sought after, but is now actively avoided. They inspire in me a powerful wave of despair, exponentially worse the more recently they were desired. Being in an abandoned mining town in the American west: exciting, spooky, melancholy. Being in Brambles cafe in Stillorgan: existentially devastating. The best way I have to describe this feeling is as if you are stuck in school on a Friday evening in the summer, pacing the strangely empty hallways and vacant classrooms, looking out the window where a perfect warm day is ending, and you know in the pit of your stomach that somewhere, everything is happening, and you will miss it.

Being at Jerry Springer in 2012 felt like seeing the last of the Borscht Belt comedians. Like the closing down sale for a department store. The final meeting of some decayed worker’s party in 1991. Every move lies heavy with the weight of all that has come before. Jerry Springer ran for almost five thousand episodes. While I wouldn’t repeat the experience, in general its a privilege to be there at the end of something. All is laid bare in the final years. Even Jerry Springer had a late style.

I’m not old, but I don’t get ID’d any more. And many of the things and places that I felt then were the centre of the world, now no longer exist. Memories and history accumulate like dust and grime, and we work daily to make sure they don’t become too much.

Rest in Peace Jerry, you had it, and you lost it.