My grandfather suffered and eventually died from emphysema after years of smoking while in the Navy. My strongest memories of him are as an old man who couldn’t breathe, and spent his days eating ramen and watching Jerry Springer. This is a personal work, but I hope it speaks to more general and wide spread forces and attitudes within our culture. In it I’ve re-framed the experience of viewing Jerry Springer. It could be a stripped down hospital room or perhaps a living room. It is a place to laugh and feel sad, to feel sad about others laughing, or to laugh at others sadness. I want the viewer to see the show from the perspective of poverty or imprisonment; to think about the words “diet” and “crowd” and “stage”. I hope that it conveys the absurdity of popular entertainment that we consume, and demonstrates how the otherworldliness of reality television can somehow amplify through that contrast the tragedies inherent in being human.