This week on Jerry Springer, "My 13-year old daughter works as an exotic dancer at the middle school and now my 12-year old son wants to be a pimp."

For my money, for pure voyeurism, it doesn't get any better than Jerry Springer. I've seen episodes where boyfriends have gotten it on with the grandmother ("But baby, in the dark, I couldn't tell it was your grandmother!") and gay men are cheating on their lovers with women who turn out to be transvestites. One episode had a three hundred-pound transvestite came out in a dominatrix outfit to confront her lover's partner. The audience was screaming and so was I, but neither of us could look away. And now Jerry has kicked it up a notch by following people into the trailer parks instead of inviting them on stage to throw chairs at one another. Now they can brawl in the comfort of their own trailer.

And even Cops has branched out to give us a variation on the theme: World's Scariest Police Chases, World's Stupidest Criminals, When Good Pets Go Bad, to name a few. And I've watched them all. One of my personal favorites was an episode of Police Chases when some nutcase stole a tank and was driving around some residential neighborhood running over everything that stood in his way. I loved the announcers too, with their insightful comments like "How do you stop a tank?" And the best part, "Oh man, he's gonna run over that bus... oh man, did you see that? He ran right through that bus!" It's almost as if they're trying not to crack up, like I am in the safety of my barca lounger. And I thought it was damn hysterical when the robber who was holding up the liquor store in Dumbest Criminals left his ID because the manager had carded him first.

Shows like Jerry Springer and Cops suddenly makes our own lives seem so much better. We watch these idiots and think, well, at least we're not them. I might have crashed my car last week but at least I didn't crack mine up doing 120 m.p.h. on a Las Vegas highway running from the cops straight into a tractor-trailer. The car was a new model Vette and cracked up the fiberglass completely upon impact. The best part was seeing the man tumbling in the dirt after the rest of the car fell apart around him. He was still going like 40 m.p.h. on his ass.

So I'm a voyeur, and an unrepentant one at that. As long as they continue to make shows like When Toddlers Attack, I'll watch them haul up the Titanic, throw punches at sister-screwing boyfriends, and arrest hard drinkin', moonshine makin', crank dealin' citizens of the glorious U.S. of A. Because everyone has a God-given right to be a moron, and it's my God-given right to watch them.