Entertainment

O no, you didn’t

Hurry! Hurry! Step this way! See the woman who had sex with her father, the little girl with one body and two heads and the woman whose face was bitten off by a raging chimpanzee!

Was that the come-on of the Coney Island “Freak Show” barker circa 1930? A lineup of “The Jerry Springer Show?”

Good guesses, but no!

Those were just a few of the guests who’ve been headliners on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” over the years — years in which the topics got increasingly more bizarre and tasteless.

Admit it, had a tabloid talker (like, say, Springer) exploited these tragedies — during sweeps month, yet — the PC media would be all over him like a bad, bad smell.

But since these were interviews on “Oprah,” they were considered — even the disgusting, incestuous affair between a drug-addled daughter and her drug-freak father — somehow “important.”

It’s time to call these segments exactly what they are: exploitative, bad-taste, ratings grabbers. They are not — repeat — not important learning experiences.

Tell me what we actually learned by watching the saint of TV take the veil off the face of a blind, massively deformed victim of a feral animal mauling? Nothing, that’s what.

Were we supposed to learn that it is bad to keep wild jungle beasts in our homes? Not for nuthin’, but I didn’t need to see this poor, poor woman, who now has a thigh transplanted onto her face, to know that keeping massive, wild African apes in the suburbs is never a good thing.

Or maybe the segment was to teach us to have compassion for accident victims?

Seems to me that if you don’t already have that particular gene in your makeup, this ratings gimmick wasn’t going to give it to you.

Neilsen: Not so ape for Oprah

But anything-for-ratings tricks have been increasingly prevalent on “Oprah” lately.

No matter how she masked it, having Mackenzie Phillips on to promote her book and discuss her “affair” with her own father was truly a low moment in American TV.

Was that idiot supposed to show us that consensual sex with your parents is not always bad? Sorry, but we don’t need to listen to a Hollywood freak discuss the things that should have been discussed years ago — with the LAPD!

OK, there’s no doubt that Oprah does a huge amount of good and that her show has enlightened people to the possibilities of spirituality, charity and making informed political decisions. And for that she should be — and certainly has been — commended.

But as the audience-appointed arbiter of good sense in this country, Oprah needs to find yet another doc — one who’s certified to perform taste transplants, because hers seems to have tragically been chewed off by too much fame.