• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 28, 2023

Jerry Springer was both lucky and shrewd, although he cultivated a public image based more on the former than the latter.

In countless interviews, Springer, who died Thursday at the age of 79, came across as this nebbish who just happened to get a syndicated talk show that then ran for 27 seasons and made him a rich man.

“It’s just chewing gum,” he would say when asked to react to critics and naysayers who complained that the outrages of “The Jerry Springer Show” were undermining civil society, perhaps irreparably.

His chewing-gum defense was like the oral version of a shoulder shrug, which he would also do, complete with upturned hands. 

When he mounted his famous, one-man defense of the show at a specially convened meeting of the full Chicago City Council in June 1999, he was asked whether the show’s producers coached or even encouraged the guests to engage in the show’s famous fistfights onstage.

His answer was another shoulder shrug. He said he didn't know, distancing himself from whatever the show’s production staff was doing down the hall. 

The Council took up the subject of the “Springer” show after a local activist launched a protest in which he pointed out that physical assaults were happening almost every day inside Springer’s Chicago studio and no police were ever called or charges filed.

This animated the City Council to hold a hearing in which they would personally quiz Springer on the nature of these fights. 

They wanted to know whether the fights were real or fake. On this subject, Springer again applied his “I don’t know” defense. 

Springer’s shoulder-shrugging answers to their questions deflated the whole thing, and the consensus afterward was that it was a complete waste of time.

Some who witnessed the spectacle in person came away impressed -- if not in awe -- of the self-effacing way Springer handled the situation and then emerged with no sanctions or repercussions of any kind.

On the contrary, he likely gained fans from the hearing, which incidentally was packed with fans of “The Jerry Springer Show” who had come from far and wide to be there.

His message on these occasions was always: Don’t take the show too seriously. It’s just not that important.

If Springer sought to minimize his show by comparing it to mere chewing gum, he literally distanced himself on the show itself. When the fights broke out on the show’s small stage, he was far away, standing among the seated spectators in the studio grandstand, literally above the fray.

From there, he watched his own show from the same vantage point as the ordinary people who loved him and sustained him for 27 seasons.