How to Be a Successful Jerry Springer Guest

Doug can see right through you.

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More About

• Jerry Springer
• Maria Shriver
• Jerry Dollars
• Doug Stanhope
• Tom Ryan

Over the next three days, right up until hours before the show aired, we tried to get another source. I went down to a theater where one of the girls from the plane performed in an improv group. She said she couldn’t talk to me because the Springer people might be watching. And she was serious. Finally, they went with their original story. Norm continued to call, mostly in the middle of the night, muttering and hanging up. About a week later we caught a break when the show Extra came up with a group of people who said their Springer shows were all rigged. It was on every local news channel that day and I made sure to call every one of them, scratching for my 15 minutes of the pie. I got on a few local news channels, including the NBC affiliate, which passed me on to NBC Dateline. 20/20 got the people from Extra and now ran a drastically different story from the one a week before. In the first story, Jerry Springer was bad for exploiting his guests. Now, Jerry Springer was bad for not really exploiting his guests. Poor prick couldn’t win either way. Dateline sent a crew to my apartment. The producer told me to pause before I answered the questions so they could cut Maria Shriver in later. I said, “So you want me to pretend that you are Maria Shriver and tell you how Jerry Springer is bullshit?” In the end, 20/20 and Dateline cut my interviews down to a few benign words, focusing mostly on the people whose episodes had already aired. I got a few sound bites and, what I was looking for initially, a great story to tell my friends. A story I got sick of telling almost immediately. About a year later, when I was on the road in Texas, I saw the Springer episode that I’d been on. They had cut my segment out, due to the publicity, but they couldn’t cut me out of the end, where everyone takes questions from the audience. There I am, for seemingly no particular reason, sitting there looking stupid.