Commentary : TALK IS CHEAP (AND TACKY) ON ‘JERRY SPRINGER SHOW’

“The more people in bed with them, the better! Monday on ‘Springer’!”

If you missed that “Jerry Springer Show” on group sex, don’t worry. There’s plenty more where it came from. Day in, day out, this 3-year-old, Chicago-based talk show (weeknights at 11 on KCAL) one thing on its mind: skanky-panky.

“I Want My Man to Stop Watching Porn!”

“He Wants Her to Quit Bikini Contests!”

“My Boyfriend Turned Out to Be a Girl!”

Each day’s non-issue is seized upon hungrily by Jerry’s guests, a crop of wailers, louts and showoffs put on the stage in a lineup of club chairs. Meanwhile, the host, a former Cincinnati mayor, wades into his current constituency, the hopped-up studio audience whose role it is to fan the flames he ignites.

Thus does the tackiness unfold, and Springer receives it with his dull but solicitous gaze. Gender-benders and adulterers are big with Jerry. But even bigger is the female bosom: If his show is any indication, Springer has a breast fixation that rivals Maidenform’s.

For instance, one recent “Springer” show posed the question, “Who is sexier? Large-breasted women or small-breasted women?” In a multi-event competition, comely specimens of both body types vamped onstage in teddies, and less, for the whooping studio audience.

Then Springer mounted his stool to deliver a “Final Thought,” his daily bid to redeem the hour’s rot with a pro-social sermonette. This time he piously told viewers that “a guy who sees a woman only for her breasts is really the biggest boob of all.”

Granted, no one who objects to Jerry’s peep show has to watch. But how long can you overlook the tortured, self-justifying logic it trades on?

Chatting with a reporter, Springer insists that his program does nothing more than “turn the camera on what really exists in our country. They’re really out there. When people say to me, ‘Where do you find these guests?’ I say, ‘They are us!’ ”

The key distinction in Springer’s mind is that, unlike you or me, his guests have simply chosen to go public. Of course, this is like arguing that on the subway, the difference between a commuter and a flasher is pants.

Springer, a man who claims never to have watched his own talk show or anybody else’s, admits he has no idea why anyone would bare all on TV.

Not that it matters. “If they don’t mind showing what they are, let’s look,” he says. “This is basically entertainment.”

Still, he can’t help but wonder.

“Why would you come here?” he asks Dodi, seated onstage alongside the nephew she slept with, his apoplectic wife, the niece who also slept with him, and a tangle of other family and friends.

Why did Dodi appear on Springer’s show? Mangling both logic and the English language, Dodi answers, “To make people aware of these type of mistakes do happen,” as if it were a public service to remind everyone to stay out of the sack with their in-laws.

Maybe Dodi would perform a better service by keeping her own counsel until she has something more useful to say. Yet she is warmly welcomed by Jerry, a self-proclaimed champion of free speech who daily lets the First Amendment take the rap for the bad manners, bad taste and voyeurism he fosters.

He may speak of his commitment to the free exchange of ideas, but on “Springer” there is no exchange and few ideas. Instead, each show becomes a brawl, befitting Jerry’s quest not for insight, but shabby spectacle.

“It’s only television,” he says of his show’s impact. “I just don’t see it as a heavy thing.”Call him irresponsible, and worse. On the other hand, don’t blame Springer alone--or his brazen guests or studio audience.

Blame yourself, too, if you think airing differences in this sort of arena serves any purpose other than the squalid.

On “The Jerry Springer Show,” the more they stir it, the more it stinks. And if the viewers haven’t noticed, it’s only because they’ve grown used to the smell.