The weirdest and wildest moments from the Jerry Springer Show

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Nobody embraced “trash TV” quite like Jerry Springer, the man who referred to himself on Twitter as “talk show host, ringmaster of civilization’s end”.

Mr Springer, who passed away at age 79 on Thursday, was the long-time host of his namesake daytime programme The Jerry Springer Show.

Expletives, fists and chairs were flung across the show’s set over 27 seasons between 1991 and 2018.

In the process, it became equal parts ratings juggernaut and cultural reject.

Here are some of the most shocking moments from arguably the most controversial and boundary-pushing talk show in history.

In a now-banned 1998 episode, Mr Springer interviewed three people in what they called interspecies relationships.

The most memorable of the trio was perhaps a Missouri man named Mark, who claimed he had married a pony named Pixel.

He insisted his equine entanglement was consensual, kissing her on the mouth and saying through tears: “If she didn’t like it, she could always leave.”

Mark declared that he had been on a 40-year “crusade to be accepted” for having sex with animals.

If the blatant zoophilia was not weird enough, he also disclosed that he was slowly dying from hepatitis as a result of the sex.

Of all the colourful characters interviewed by Mr Springer, few stood out as vividly as the self-proclaimed “kung fu hillbilly” Diemon Dave.

Dave was having a problem with his roommate Lil Wayne – no relation to the award-winning rapper – and was itching for a fight so bad he told the show’s security not to interfere.

Having gorged on Chuck Norris and Jean Claude Van Damme movies on the VCR in his trailer, he said he had studied the martial art and practiced it in the mirror.

“If he comes out here acting a fool, I’m gon’ kung fu him,” he told the crowd through an extremely thick Southern drawl.

When his nemesis came out, the shirts came off quickly and they came to blows – but it quickly became clear that Dave was no Bruce Lee.

In a bizarre tale on the show’s 16th season, a guest named Sandra told Mr Springer she had cut off her own legs with a saw about six years ago.

The then-48-year-old transgender wheelchair user said she had decided at age 14 that she did not want her legs anymore.

“My brain just kept saying ‘Get rid of them.’ So I had to get rid of them,” she explained, adding that she had previously tried to self-infect so doctors would have to amputate the legs.

She was later confronted on the show by Kenny, a man born without legs, who lambasted her for her ungratefulness.

Mr Springer faced repeated criticism that he was exploiting vulnerable trans people on his shows; he defended himself as somebody who gave transgender Americans more exposure than anywhere else in the entertainment landscape at the time.

Every fetish imaginable may have made it on screen over the show’s three-decade run.

In 2012’s “Outrageous Guilty Pleasures” episode, a mother and daughter shared the stage with Mr Springer.

The two were a dominatrix duo – women who dominate men during sexual activities, often physically.

Things got weirder when the duo brought their sex slave out on stage.

Then, as The Jerry Springer Show so often did, the man’s wife also made her way onto set – to berate and kink-shame him.

A notorious 1997 episode titled “Klanfrontation” saw Mr Springer moderate a conversation on race and religion.

His guests? Members of the Ku Klux Klan and the Jewish Defence League (JDL).

Unsurprisingly, there was little overlap between the two groups and one KKK member mockingly revealed a Jewish kippah beneath his hood to JDL chairman Irv Rubin.

The faux debate quickly erupted into an all-out brawl, with both Mr Springer’s security and members of the crowd also getting involved.

It was one of a handful of times the show probed – albeit without much tact – uncomfortable topics like white supremacy and racism.