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"Grab a beer and drop your pants;
Send your 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 Heather.
Juggy girls on trampolines;
Time to loosen those blue jeans.
It's the, Man Shoooooooooooooow!"
The Man Show theme song

The Man Show was a half-hour program on Comedy Central starring Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel (followed by Joe Rogan and Doug Stanhope in the final season) that centered around jokes about...well, "manly" stuff. Sports, beer, babes...that sort of thing. Aside from giving Jimmy Kimmel an extra paycheck (he still did a little work on Win Ben Stein's Money when the show first aired), The Man Show was notable for its eye candy-laden "Juggy Dance Squad", who would provide entertainment for the audience during commercial breaks. And the whole "jumping on trampolines" bit at the end of every show.

Lasted for five seasons. The first four seasons featured Adam and Jimmy, and all four of them are available on DVD at the Comedy Central store. The fifth and final season featuring Doug and Joe, widely regarded as being inferior to the previous seasons, has not been released on DVD.


It's the Man Tropes!

  • Abusive Parents: Jimmy is this to his son Kevin. At one point Kevin got revenge on his dad by telling his mom about his dad having affairs with many other women in New Orleans. He also uses his pre-adolescent daughter as a human shield to get past the feminist picket line besieging the studio on "Bring Your Daughter To Work Day" but is then appalled when she joins the Juggies bouncing on their trampoline.
  • Affectionate Parody: Of manly stuff and manly behavior.
  • A God Am I: The "When Adam is King" skits.
  • All Men Are Perverts: The basis for most of the jokes.
  • Anti-Role Model: Jimmy is a really bad role model for his son Kevin. One time Kevin got 3 F's and 1 D on his report card that really annoyed Gina, Jimmy's response was gleeful and he stated "Gina, get the boy a beer."
  • Artistic License – Biology: In a bit about vasectomies one of the characters comments that it's important to him to see a puddle of semen after masturbation. It isn't entirely clear if the characters being unfamiliar with their own anatomy is part of the joke, or if the hosts legitimately thought that a vasectomy would stop them from ejaculating semen, but semen is produced in the prostate, not the testicles. While their semen would no longer be fertile, it would still be ejaculatednote .
  • Audience Participation Song: Prior to Bill "The Fox" Foster's death, the show featured brief segments where he lead the studio audience in sing-alongs of bawdy songs.
  • Bestiality Is Depraved: In a Season 2 episode, Jimmy replaces his wife Gina with a chimpanzee. Dung Fu ensues.
  • Blackface: The Karl Malone sketches. Malone was actually played by Jimmy. In Jimmy's defense, he never wanted to insult the man and deeply regrets the sketches.
  • Butt-Monkey: Gina, Jimmy's wife, is always getting harassed by her chauvinist husband. Jimmy one time replaced her with a chimpanzee to be his wife.
  • Buxom Beauty Standard: Juggy Vanessa got the most screen time out of all the Juggy dancers, and was even featured in the show's intro. She was also the bustiest Juggy.
  • Carpet of Virility: Adam and Jimmy were covered in body hair. This is what made them taking their clothes off Fan Disservice.
  • The Cast Show Off: "The Fox"'s ability to slam down two pints of beer in roughly 1 second flat - although the hosts kept the tradition alive after his passing, they couldn't drink nearly as fast, and generally wound up spilling it through trying.
  • Cool and Unusual Punishment: What the bad results for the Wheel of Destiny usually were.
  • Creative Closing Credits: As the closing credits rolled for each episode, footage of girls jumping on trampolines would play in the background.
  • Discredited Meme: Invoked with one of the men from their "Museum of Annoying Guys" (faux Latinate name: "Jokus Repeatus Shut the F Up-us") illustrated this trope. "It's the 'beat a Catchphrase to death' guy."
  • Dressed In Drag: Jimmy many times.
  • Every Episode Ending: "And now, girls jumping on trampolines!"
    • Also the "Ziggy Zaggy" bit from season 1, where piano-player "The Fox" would down two huge mugs of beer in under a second. It was a popular bit that would've continued if The Fox hadn't died of prostate cancer off-season. Adam and Jimmy still did it after The Fox passed on, in tribute to him.
  • Expospeak Gag: In one of their more infamous moments, Adam and Jimmy got over 1000 women to sign a petition to end Womens' Suffrage - in other words, denying women the vote. Crosses into Viewers Are Morons since most signers just assumed it was bad without any prodding simply because "Suffrage" sounds like "suffering", and the guys saying that it's a bad thing.
  • Face Death with Dignity: Exaggerated through the "Die Like A Man" sketch, which involved an assisted suicide service that invoked Testosterone Poisoning to give their clients a more dignified death.
  • Fan Disservice: A disturbingly high number of skits featured Adam and Jimmy wearing nothing but their underwear. One sketch even had them as lapdancers wearing micro-thongs, the pair repeating Benny Hill's mantra of never asking their girls to wear anything they hadn't worn themselves.
  • Fanservice with a capital F.
  • Fat Flex: In the beach episode, Jimmy shows his son how to properly suck in his stomach when a girl walks past (note this was back when he was much heavier).
  • From the Mouths of Babes: Aaron, the "Man Show Boy". NOT Andy Milonakis.
  • Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: This seems to be the entire point of the show.
  • His and Hers: Played with in the episode where Adam and Jimmy visit Snoop Dogg's crib. While giving them the grand tour, Snoop shows them the bathroom. On a towel rack is one large towel marked "His" and several smaller towels labeled "Hos."
  • Insane Troll Logic: Jimmy thinks that getting poor grades at school is better than excelling since he knows this guy who went to college for 8 years who makes only $30,000 a year at best as while he himself is dumb as a brick and is a highly paid major TV show star. Therefore, Jimmy concludes the economic system rewards stupidity!
  • It's All About Me: Jimmy is full of this, especially towards his family.
  • Jerkass: Jimmy tries his best to be the biggest one ever put on a TV show, being a total dick to his wife Gina and to his son Kevin, bullying him for such things like crying over Pikachu getting sick and calling him a girl for crying, lashing out at him for dancing to music and refusing him a popsicle.
  • Ms. Fanservice: The Juggy Dancers, who would also participate in some skits in addition to their usual dancing.
  • Prison Rape: Happens to Adam by a big burly prisoner when he (ironically) got arrested for trying to sexually harass two women at a restaurant. Adam gets released 50 years later as an old man, and a blonde girl starts offering sex in front of him then he runs towards her... and runs past her to go for an elderly fat black man on the bench.
  • Rated M for Manly: Dirty jokes? Check. Beer? Check. Hot girls in skimpy outfits? Check.
  • Refuge in Audacity: About the only way they get away with the stuff the Man Show Boy did, such as when he ran his own beer stand, and actually carded some of his customers.
  • Selective Stupidity: The hosts collect signatures from women to "End Women's Suffrage," just by phrasing it as if "suffrage" was a synonym for "suffering." To their credit, they did show several people pointing out how dumb that is and trying to correct people who had been duped, demonstrating that not everyone they met was ignorant enough to fall for it.
  • Self-Deprecation: Adam masturbating and his unibrow, Jimmy's weight.
    • At least once, Adam threw to a commercial break by saying, "Stay tuned for more ridiculous crap!"
  • Sexy Mentor: One of the skits on the show was titled "Household Hints from Adult Film Stars" and featured real-life porn stars (often clad only in lingerie) providing Martha Stewart-like advice on topics like housekeeping or cooking. Predictably, their demonstrations would inevitably cause them to lose most of what little they were wearing, or end up soaking wet.
  • Shoddy Knockoff Product: FX Channels "X Show" was a pretty obvious clone and even filmed nearby in the same studio lot. It did not last very long.
  • Shout-Out: During the intro, a midget construction worker is shown suspended from a girder by his hardhat. This is a reference to a Krazy Glue commercial from the early 80s, which demonstrated the glue's bond in a similar fashion.
  • Shown Their Work: their goodbye catchphrase "Ziggy socky, ziggy socky, hoy hoy hoy!" followed by chugging a beer is a traditional Oktoberfest cheer that's actually spelled "Zicke zacke, zicke zacke, hoi hoi hoi!" and responded to with a drink of beer.
  • Sketch Comedy: With segments involving people on the street. Eventually the scripted parts were phased out, leaving only bits where they messed with people and visited places.
  • Stripperiffic: The Juggy dance squad. Every episode had a different "theme" that would be reflected in their always-skimpy costumes. One episode might have them dressed in sexy schoolgirl outfits, another episode might have them dressed in cheerleader costumes, another might have them dressed as sexy nurses, etc.
  • Take a Third Option: During the opening episode in one season, Adam and Jimmy held a competition to hire a new Juggy into the ranks. After they got down to the final two, rather than pick between them, they said "Screw it" and hired them both. Everybody wins!
  • Testosterone Poisoning: Adam and Jimmy always played things tongue-in-cheek, which is what made the show work in the first place (because let's face it, guys: if we just want to see boobs, there are plenty of ways to do that). Their replacements did not share this talent for satire.
    • One man got a swirley by Lou Ferrigno himself by landing on a bad portion of THE WHEEL OF DESTINY.
  • Thong of Shielding: One episode featured Adam and Jimmy saying that the Comedy Central censors had told them they could show up to three-quarters of someone's backside. So, naturally, they invented the "three-quarter ass pants" which were cut so low that only the very bottom of the ass was covered.
  • Vox Pops: One of their more infamous segments was this where they were asking people to sign a petition to "End Women's Suffrage" which, due to people assuming that "suffrage" meant suffering as opposed to the right to vote, even a number of women signed it after being given oblique answers on what the petition was for.

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