But the market is a terrible place to be and it happens to be the place where Mr. Cramer day trades on his persona. He still appears on television screens at a camera-ready desk that is decorated by a herd of animal figurines. The bulls still outnumber the bears by two to one  there are a few pigs thrown in for good measure  but the man who sits behind it and rants knows better. He is not predicting that the bottom has arrived or will be here any time soon.

“Can we have the recession first before we decide that we’ve found the bottom?” he said. “I want to see the things that typically happen in a recession before we say it’s the bottom, and then I will be more positive.”

On Friday’s show, one of his featured stocks was Watsco, a heating and ventilation company that was paying out decent dividends as its stock sunk along with the rest of the market.

“This company is paying you to wait for the bottom,” he said with his characteristic gusto as he stalked the Steadicam in studio. Later in the same show, he suggested that “this is a time when you try to hunker down and lose less than the other guys.”

It makes for a far less festive hour with a manic guy who treats the camera as an opponent in a wrestling match. (CNBC has a content-sharing agreement with The New York Times.)

On “Mad Money” he now makes fewer recommendations and is hitting the button marked “House of Pain” a lot more often than the one marked “House of Pleasure,” but tearing the horns off a bull does not make it any more relevant to an economy rendered in fragile china.

Mr. Cramer will never be Suze Orman, telling you how to carefully handle the money you have left. He is a blue sky kind of guy, a creature of a fast-fading era. The viewers still shout “Booyah,” when they call in, but nobody, including Mr. Cramer, is feeling it.