The ‘Man Show’ Diaspora – The New York Times

It’s possible you do not remember “The Man Show.” Or perhaps you don’t want to.

From 1999 to 2004, the show — created and hosted by Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla, and later Joe Rogan and Doug Stanhope — was, as Mr. Kimmel once put it, “a joyous celebration of chauvinism.”

The idea was to appeal to men with a certain brand of over-the-top frat-boy humor: crude jokes about beer, bodily functions and women, with a sidekick who could drink a pint in one gulp, resident “Juggy girls” who entertained the audience with their, well, have a look at the name, and credits that ran while women jumped on trampolines in short skirts and bikinis.

“I held casting sessions where they jumped on a mini-trampoline,” said Dianne Martinez, a former associate producer who was in charge of casting the Juggies, as they were known. Ms. Martinez is now is now the vice mayor of Emeryville, Calif.

Times have changed, certainly. And so have the television perches of some of the former “Man Show” hosts. Jimmy Kimmel is on network late-night television with “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” speaking openly about health care and gun violence. (CNN has called him “America’s conscience.”) On Thursday, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind. — who dropped out of the Democratic presidential race this month — appeared as his guest host.

“I really thought we had a shot,” Mr. Buttigieg said of his presidential campaign in his opening monologue. “But turns out, I was about 40 years too young and 38 years too gay.”

The politician who just two weeks ago was wearing another crisp suit on a presidential debate stage spent the night, in an audience-free studio, solemnly reminding people to call their representatives to demand coronavirus testing and emergency paid sick leave before running through both self-deprecating and Tiffany Trump-deprecating jokes.

Mr. Kimmel’s decision to invite Mr. Buttigieg to guest host was only the latest example of how some “Man Show” alumni are using their current platforms to get political.

Mr. Rogan, the podcast titan and mixed martial arts commentator, boosted the candidacies of Representative Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang before ultimately endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders. He has one of the most popular podcasts in the world and has become a hero to a certain breed of politically frustrated men across America.

Mr. Carolla, who set a Guinness World Record a few years ago for downloads of his podcast, has been traveling the country examining the plague of political censorship on college campuses and recently released a documentary called “No Safe Spaces.”

Mr. Stanhope is on a comedy tour he is cheekily calling the “Hand Sanitizer Tour.”

“The Man Show” was a product of its time: delivered by men, for men during an era when a white comic performed in blackface without significant opposition and mused onstage that he hoped he didn’t have a gay son (Mr. Kimmel). There were sketches in which the hosts drunkenly stumbled (Mr. Kimmel and Mr. Carolla) through an airport dressed like pilots without getting stopped by the T.S.A., and previewed (Mr. Rogan and Mr. Stanhope) a series of breast implant innovations — including Nerf footballs and a condiment dispenser.

Each of the former hosts either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

In the show’s first episode, in a monologue (manologue?) atop the Hoover Dam, Mr. Kimmel and Mr. Carolla asserted that “Just as these heroic men did 60 years ago, we are building a dam: a dam to hold back the tidal wave of feminization that is taking over this country; a dam to stop the estrogen that is drowning us in political correctness.” (If only they knew.)

Later in the episode, they posted up at a local farmer’s market collecting signatures to “end women’s suffrage” (to be fair, “suffrage” does sound a lot like “suffering”).

Some of the sketches were funny. But it’s unlikely that anyone would think “The Man Show” could exist now as it did then — though Mr. Kimmel did suggest, in a 2017 interview, that it might be an even bigger hit because “there’s more back to lash against.”

Still, it does seem that “The Man Show” was in fact a launching pad for continued relevance into 2020. So what does the success of the Man Show diaspora tell us?

“This year’s campaign is now officially a Man’s Show,” said Ann Johnson, an associate professor of communication studies at California State University Long Beach who published a scholarly paper on “The Man Show” back in the early 2000s. She was referring, of course, to the race for the presidency — which, even after a historically diverse field competed on the Democratic side, is almost certain to be filled by a 70-something-year-old white man.

Part of the show’s premise was that the women’s movement had driven men to the fringes. Yet the show wasn’t actually fringe at all. When it premiered, it was Comedy Central’s second most popular show, after “South Park.” More than a third of its viewers were women — and so were many of the Comedy Central executives in charge of production.

“What surprised me was just how popular it actually was,” Professor Johnson said.

The idea was that the guys were in on the joke. The point was to be over the top. They were poking fun at the toxicity of men’s bad behaviors. Get it?

“If you go back and look at those bits, I think everyone thinks that it was some sort of misogynistic, beer-swigging, whatever,” Mr. Carolla said in an interview last year. “The reality is we were always the butt of the joke.”

It was unclear if the fans ever got that — and certainly not the ones that Mr. Kimmel has said he came to loathe. “I had no fun doing that show. It was all work for me. When the hiatus came, I was delighted,” he told GQ in 2008.

Still, Comedy Central marketed the show as “a celebration of everything manly,’” as Eileen Katz, then Comedy Central’s executive vice president of programming, put it at the time. “And for women who are watching, it’s a great peek behind the zipper to find out what guys would want to do every day.”

But was ogling women on trampolines really what men would do if given free rein? Maybe. Or maybe that underestimated the guys.

We are in a different time now, a #MeToo world, a world in which it is unimaginable that cable television executives would greenlight “Man Show”-like behavior. Former staff members on that show, for the most part, don’t even want to talk about it. (Nearly two dozen of them either declined to comment or did not respond to requests.)

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t some version of the show that could exist today.

“People ask me about a new ‘The Man Show’ all the time,” said Scott A. Stone, an executive producer on the show. “The question is, what does ‘The Man Show’ look like today?”

He said it was a question better answered by somebody from the next generation. Maybe, even … a woman?

“There are still men, and we still laugh,” Mr. Stone said.

Susan Beachy contributed research.

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