Down With This Sort of Thing

On Jerry Springer, the Overton window, and cancel culture.

The Jerry Springer Show was controversial from its beginning. In America in the nineties, it wasn’t uncommon to turn on the TV and find the professionally outraged, often wearing clerical collars, calling for the show to be cancelled. Here in the UK, our own would-be censors targeted not the talk show, but the comedy opera bearing its name. Jerry Springer: The Opera was (much like its source material) notoriously bawdy and gleefully profane. When the BBC aired a performance of the opera back in 2005, aspiring theocrats decided the comedy was no laughing matter.

To a vocal minority of Christians, Jerry Springer: The Opera was intolerable blasphemy. It didn’t matter that the BBC aired it after the watershed, when kids were tucked up in bed and ostensible grown-ups could watch the performance if they so chose. The show featured God and the Devil as characters, along with obscenity-laden dialogue, and that got the gears moving in the machine of fundamentalist outrage.

At first, you wouldn’t…