Jerry Springer the Opera: Musical comedy. Book and lyrics by Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas. Music by Thomas. Directed by M. Graham Smith. Through Oct. 16. Ray of Light Theatre, Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., San Francisco. Two hours, 40 minutes. $25-$36. (415) 690-7658. www.jerrysf.com.

Smile, San Francisco. Your "Jerry Springer Moment," as one of the peppier songs puts it, has finally arrived.

It's big. It's bold. It's a remarkably funny and somewhat enlightening stew of musical, verbal and visual profanities on top of obscenities, milking shock value for humor of every variety. "Jerry Springer the Opera" opened Ray of Light Theatre's 10th season Saturday at the Victoria Theatre, and the show's long-delayed West Coast premiere is a boisterous barrel of fun.

It isn't as polished a production as we were promised in 2005, when the controversial London smash hit was supposed to have its American premiere in the Best of Broadway series. The Broadway-bound production never materialized. New York still hasn't seen a full production, though Chicago, Memphis, Minneapolis, Boston and Des Moines - among other cities - have, some as pestered by "blasphemy" protesters as the English national tour and BBC telecast.

Polish is beside the point in composer-lyricist Richard Thomas and co-writer Stewart Lee's loving satire of trash TV and the mania for self-exposure. The cartoonish characters don't require acting so much as the right attitude and look (in Margaret Whitaker's apt costumes). The cast may not be up to the famed Ku Klux Klan tap dance, but Chris Black's kick-step choreography serves the turn well enough.

The operatic flourishes of Thomas' complex score are more demanding, but director M. Graham Smith and music director Ben Prince have assembled a huge cast of strong voices from local opera, operetta, musical, choir and drag groups. Clearer enunciation would be an advantage at times, but the musical joys of the arias, ecclesiastical chants and song-and-dance come across admirably from Prince's hot eight-piece band and the many potent singers.

Apart from Patrick Michael Dukeman's engagingly crotchety, self-absorbed Springer, this is a sung-through musical. It's a regular - well, perhaps exaggerated - Springer TV show that literally descends into "Hell," though not before passing through an extraordinary "Purgatory" graced by Tracy Camp wailing a virtuosic dirge and a chorus of Dead Guests crooning "Eat, excrete and watch TV."

Camp is the betrayed bride-to-be of the first hilarious group of TV guests, an "I've been seeing someone else" episode featuring Steve Hess' smarmy stud, Jordan Best as Camp's coke-slut best friend and Timitio Artusio as a drama-queen pre-op transsexual. Chris Yorro brings down the house, with facial expressions any parent will recognize, as a man in a diaper. Rebecca Pingree tears it down again with an operatic turn as an X-rated Baby Snooks.

There's more, but half the fun is in not knowing too much in advance. The graphic sex-and-bathroom humor gives way to more metaphysical concerns in the second act, when Springer is stuck in the middle of an old feud between Satan (a competently insidious Jonathan Reisfeld) and Jesus (Yorro). Other former guests show up as biblical figures taking sides.

The total package is a big, tuneful, camp hoot. The X-rated language and explicit material won't appeal to some, but there's nothing offensive in this show's pervasive celebration of the joys of tolerance and human diversity.