How About That Thing?

Grab a beer and drop your pants. Send the wife and kids to France. It’s The Man Show!

Quit your job and light a fart. Yank your favorite private part. It’s The Man Show.

It’s a place where men can come together.

Look at the cans on this chick named Hether!

Juggy girls on trampolines. Time to loosen those blue jeans. It’s the…

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Mostly gentlemen. We’re starting 2025 off with the manliest thing I can think of: The Man Show.

The Man Show was a show on Comedy Central that lasted… Honestly, a lot longer than I remember. Starting in 1999, and apparently ending in 2004. Though I remember it disappearing a lot sooner for some reason.

I don’t remember who coined the term anymore, but I remember somewhere around the early 2000s, an internet columnist once referred to this style of humor as “fratire”. IE, it’s a style of humor that equally embraces and makes fun of masculinity. See also: The Best Page in the Universe, or The Be-A-Man Experience. The Man Show most definitely fits into this umbrella term, equally celebrating the joys of manhood, while at the same time not taking itself TOO seriously.

The show was hosted by two people you might be familiar with.

Boy does this take me back. Remember when Jimmy Kimmel was funny? Yeah, me neither. But do you remember when he and Adam Carolla were a duo? I tell you what, they’ve come such a long way since. Adam Carolla voicing several characters on animated series of varying quality and hosting a podcast I never get around to listening to. Jimmy Kimmel being one of many painfully unfunny comedians stinking up late night with an equally painfully unfunny talk show. And somewhere on that road, they spent a few years hosting this of all things.

So what exactly WAS The Man Show? Honestly… That’s a good question. I’ve never really been able to put my finger on what you call a show like this. Not so much with the hyper masculine sense of humor, but more about the format and the structure of the show.

The show usually opened with Adam and Jimmy talking about a topic that might or might not relate to the theme of the overall episode. From there, they did sketches like The Man Show Lab, where they debuted products dedicated to making life easier; or The Man Show Hall of Fame, where outstanding men in the field of manliness are inducted. They’d often end the show with a Q&A with the audience. So forth, and so on.

The only things that really carried over from episode to episode every single time was the Man Show toast. At first, the man show toast was led by this guy

I don’t remember his real name, but the Man Show fandom knew him the best as Fox. He possessed the ability to drink beer faster than any man in existence. He led the audience in vulgar songs before and after the commercial breaks, and led the audience in The Man Show toast, calling out “Ziggy zoggy ziggy zoggy OI OI OI!” three times before pounding some brews.

Unfortunately, at the peak of The Man Show’s popularity, Fox passed away. And ironically enough, it had nothing to do with his alcohol intake. If I remember right, it was cancer that claimed his life. A real shame.

And, of course, there was the infamous closer: the “girls on trampolines” segment. As the credits played, the “juggy dancers” who appeared frequently to lead the show into and out of commercial breaks would jump on trampolines while the credits rolled. That was literally all there was to it.

So yeah, what do you call a show like this? Wikipedia apparently called it a sketch show, but IMDB called it a talk show. Perhaps both?

All I really know is I used to sneak in episodes of this show all the time when I was in middle school. Yeah, unsurprisingly, my mom hated this show, and for the first season or so, she outright banned me from watching it. Which was especially baffling to fourteen-year-old me, because she let me watch South Park, and I’d have made the argument that South Park was WORSE! I guess a fourteen-year-old boy like me could handle fart jokes and libertarian politics, but god help us all if he watched a girl on a trampoline.

I didn’t remember much from its initial run, outside the fact the final season replaced Carolla and Kimmel with Joe Rogan and Doug somethingoranother. Yeah, Joe Rogan seems like one of those subjects that needs its own article, but for now, the one thing I’ll say is I don’t mind him as much as the delicate little flowers that make up Gen-Z seem to. That being said, his stint on The Man Show was definitely the deathblow that killed that show’s momentum dead. You spent four seasons with Adam and Jimmy, and suddenly, you’re just supposed to forget all that and welcome these other two jackoffs? No thanks.

As a teenager, I loved the show. It was raunchy, it was gross, it was VERY politically incorrect, and I loved it.

Then I watched it again in the 2010s when it ended up on G4. Yeah, speaking of things that deserve their own article someday… I remember watching this show on G4, and… Well, I still love the theme song. Unfortunately, it was pretty much all down hill from there.

I’m no prude by any stretch of the imagination (lord knows I’ve probably overshared a bit here and there on this site), but I kind of found the raunch, the fratire, and the general “let’s be as offensive as possible” approach to programming to be a bit… Well… Juvenile.

The Man Show is undisputedly a product of its time. Partly because there are moments where they make it very obvious what year this was filmed in with comments like “I’m thankful I live in a wealthy country with no enemies”.

More than anything, though, The Man Show is something you could never get away with in 2025. Shit, part of middle schooler me was genuinely shocked with how much they were getting away with in 1999! This was definitely a show that could only exist in the 2000s: a decade where humor was at its absolute most mean-spiritted, and if you didn’t like it, it was because you were a pussy, and needed to toughen up. Or at least that’s what my track coach insisted when I got sick of the other guys calling me a [BUNDLE OF STICKS]. These days… Well, let’s just say that, at absolute best, if you tried making a show like this, a lot of the audience would be wearing red hats and ear bandages, if you know what I mean.

A show like this is definitely the kind of thing that needs to be seen to be believed. And hey, you can find it on Tubi now. So if you aren’t pissed off about how incompatible it is with screen reader software like I am, you can watch it there for free.

Unfortunately, I have no girls on trampolines to end this article with. I have no trampoline, and the one girl I know would probably not approve of me filming her on the trampoline. Hell, I’m lucky I get away with as much as I do as it is! So… Yeah, I’m just going to end here.

Ah