From the ‘Springer’ Files . . .

There are some things you just can’t do. For example, as someone thoughtful and perceptive was explaining on Jerry Springer’s television show Monday: “You can’t turn a ho into a housewife!”

Or turn a midway sideshow into a main attraction. Or can you?

For a bracing dose of the human experience, Jerry is the guy you absolutely must tune in. You won’t be alone. When it comes to drawing a crowd these days, the man is getting to be an animal. He’s now so big that he played himself on “The X-Files” Sunday. So big that he’s got a video out that boasts, “Too Hot for Television.” When it comes to “Jerry Springer,” what might that be? Necrophilia, perhaps? Nah, he covered that with the episode on undertaker sex.

Who is watching “Jerry Springer”? Not you, of course. You’re too busy reading Proust and gearing up for the opening of the new Getty Center. But others clearly are watching, affirmed by Springer’s syndicated freak menagerie climbing ever higher in the ratings, tapping a public taste for, well. . . .

On “Jerry Springer,” gargantuan boobs apply not only to female anatomy but also to Springer’s guests.

On “Jerry Springer,” preoperative transsexuals mingle with postoperative lobotomies, hotheads with empty heads, human cabbages with potatoes.

On “Jerry Springer,” you get more slugfests and sucker punches than Geraldo Rivera envisioned even in his best dreams.

On “Jerry Springer,” the unmentionable “F” word is fidelity.

On “Jerry Springer,” boyfriends reveal they’re girls and girlfriends turn out to be boys. Wives disclose to their shocked husbands that they’re hookers. Or reveal to their mates that they’ve been sleeping with their best friends. Or husbands reveal to their wives that they’ve got other wives. Or reveal they secretly wear their wives’ panties. Or learn from their wives--with the camera so tight on them that you can see through their eyes to the backs of their heads--that they’re not the biological fathers of their sons or daughters.

On “Jerry Springer,” the medically afflicted get trivialized and lumped with the planet’s human wreckage even when the show gives lip service to being sensitive. Take that segment titled “Looking for Love With Tourette Syndrome,” for example. Springer: “Lauren, has it always been barking?”

Arrrrrrrgh!

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Yes, you argue, but hasn’t this always been the basic menu of trashy syndicated talk shows, from “Ricki Lake” to “Sally Jessy Raphael”? What is it about Springer’s show that sets it apart from the others to the extent that it has emerged as one of the hottest properties in syndication, winning its time slot in major city after major city, and becoming so popular at 11 p.m. on KCAL-TV Channel 9 that the station is now airing a second weekday Springer show at 9 a.m.?

Well, that shameless phony Sally Jessy, for example, has always presented herself as Mother Teresa while exploiting for profit the pathetically gnarled lumps she professes to care so deeply for. In contrast, Springer proudly wears sleaze and slime like a chest full of medals. He’s blatant about doing this for laughs, cheerfully sacrificing his guests on the altar of low-brow entertainment, then casting them aside like one of weepy Sally Jessy’s tissues.

Oh, he, too, is prone to sanctimony, as in those show-ending sermons pretentiously labeled “Final Thought,” through which he seeks to legitimize the bedlam that he has just presided over and encouraged. And Monday night’s hour of highlights celebrating his 1,200th show featured one of him courageously confronting a serial killer (who, er, was behind bars), another of him angrily going nose to nose with a woman beater (“If I ever find out you’ve laid a hand on another woman again, I’m gonna haul your ass into court!”) with the camera on their noses. Jerry’s a pro, so they probably got it all in one take.

For the most part, though, Springer delivers exactly the mindless, low burlesque that’s advertised. Although the throng in his Chicago studio joyously hisses and hoots on cue--as if watching professional wrestling instead of blacks getting white-robed Ku Klux Klansmen in hammerlocks--Springer’s frozen smirk implies that he is his show’s best and most appreciative audience. And you get the impression that he is just barely able to keep a straight face.

No wonder, for he has elevated (or lowered, depending on your perspective) “wild and crazy”--his description of his show--to new, exotic realms of absurdity.

It’s not just any talk show that, as Springer did Monday morning, would have on a “naked human bowling ball,” preceded by a stripper who specializes in men with a sexual fetish for breast milk.

“Basically,” explained Brandy, a busty blond in a black outfit so skimpy it appeared tattooed on her, “I spray it into a glass and people . . . drink it.” Naturally, Jerry was stunned. “Isn’t that downright perverted?” Brandy didn’t think so. “Isn’t that kind of sacred?” Jerry pressed, meaning that women should reserve their milk for their children. “I have more than enough to spare,” Brandy said. As for men guzzling her milk, she added later, “It is nutritional.”

What??? Well, the audience didn’t buy that at all, none of the deep thinkers in attendance bothering to question why it was acceptable to drink a four-legged animal’s milk, but not a human’s.

An issue for Charlie Rose, perhaps, but not for the Springer show, which, after Brandy’s stepsister and half-sister had berated her, moved on to the next topic: A barely clad voluptuous female stripper who, it turned out, wasn’t really female, jolting the male audience member whom “she” had turned on with her close-contact gyrations.

Didn’t they do that last week, and the week before, and the week before? Never mind. “Jerry Springer” viewers are either amnesiacs or don’t care.

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There are other aspects of “Jerry Springer” worth noting. One is that at least half the episodes end up in fistfights or brawls, with the studio audience egging on the combatants, demonstrating just how high the bar has been raised on talk-show violence.

Now a distant memory is the furor generated by a race-inspired free-for-all that erupted on an episode of “Geraldo” in 1989. Today’s hot-tempered Hulksters on Springer’s show are (ho hum) routine, affirming just how desensitized the public has become to this brand of spectacle.

Another issue concerns just how much of the Springer show is on the level. You’d guess about half, given the pedestrian acting by many “guests,” some of whom look suspiciously familiar, as if they’d appeared on previous Springer shows in different roles. Again, amnesiacs don’t question.

And who is watching? Draw your own conclusions from the bulk of the sponsors buying time on the show in Los Angeles. They include bankruptcy advisors, personal injury lawyers, insurance underwriters targeting problem drivers and psychics charging 99 cents a minute (“And you get this power crystal free”). There are also some spots in the morning “Jerry Springer” that seem aimed at least partially at kids, despite the show’s TV-14 rating. First warn them, then sell them.

Watching “Jerry Springer,” in other words, you learn that the biggest whores of all are Jerry and the stations that air him. But at least they don’t try to hide it.