Why the Brutality and Bromance of ‘Jackass’ Is So Timeless

Jackass, a television show and series of movies about a gang of dirtbag skateboarding adults who do pranks and hurt themselves on camera, is back, baby!

A new Jackass movie, Jackass Forever, is in movie theaters 22 years after the boys first graced the TV sets of every brain-fried, half-depressed teenager in America. New cast members! New hijinks! The critics love it! Well, except for this killjoy over at The Hollywood Reporter, who wrote:

‘Jackass Forever’ Is the Masterpiece That Will Unite AmericaThe Daily Beast’s Obsessed

Kevin Fallon, Marlow Stern

I am an educated man. I have read many leather-bound books. Here is God’s honest truth: Yes, absolutely those things are funny, especially when they are self-inflicted and wrapped in a cocoon of friendship and positivity.

Jackass is like if a bunch of eighth graders trying to impress each other in an abandoned suburban parking lot possessed of little fear of death were strapped with cameras and told to go wild, but also those eighth graders were grown men and have imaginations that conjure depravities and methods of bodily mayhem that transcend even God’s broad concept of suffering.

It is a one-of-a-kind object, unduplicated and undefeated by anyone since, be they tooling around on the internet or taking a fat check from a media conglomerate. The spinoffs (Wildboyz, Bad Grandpa, a litany of soul-deadening Bam Margera-fronted projects), where fragments of the Jackass crew do similarly stupid shit, manage good moments but don’t come close to the whole. The players and their comradeship, the smashed-together lo-fi filmmaking, the extraordinarily specific aesthetic, drawn from an extraordinarily specific time and place (late-’90s skateboarding culture)—it’s just perfect.

The origins of Jackass are well-known: pro skateboarder Bam Margera and struggling actor and stuntman Johnny Knoxville were both making separate skateboard-related videos where they did dumb stunts. At some point, Spike Jonze, then a notable music video director turned notable motion picture director, and Jeff Tremaine, an editor at Big Brother magazine, began pitching a mash-up of these two projects. MTV bit.

“Our plan was to just let Spike do the talking,” Tremaine, the project’s director, said in a recent Hollywood Reporter feature. “He was the only legit one that everyone was interested in anyway. So we showed it with these two women, I don’t even remember their names. They were offended and just disgusted by what we had just shown them. And I went, ‘Oh well, fuck, man. Good thing I didn’t quit Big Brother yet.’ And our second pitch was at MTV—and it was the exact opposite. We showed them the sizzle tape, and they were just dying laughing. And they wanted it right away.”

Jackass was born in one of American pop culture’s biggest voids—that weird space between Kurt Cobain’s suicide and 9/11. The mass of stuff from that time reeks of a world that was cracking up, haunted by the feeling that something bad was just around the corner. Not much art with enduring value emerged from this morass, unless you really like Limp Bizkit or loudness-war pop music whose producers hadn’t quite figured out how to make digital samplers sound decent yet or Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla or dozens of vapid cocaine- fueled Pulp Fiction rip-offs. Everything was big, loud, and intensely apolitical (taking their cues from Clinton on that last one). Think about it: Blink-182 was huge. How could that happen in a world that wasn’t guzzling pointlessness as if it were Spice Melange? Hip-hop was still often excellent, but nearly everything else netting airtime on MTV and Top 40 radio was bone-shatteringly stupid.

Jackass is definitely stupid.

Really, really stupid. Violent, immature, transgressive in form but only occasionally in function. It fits in nicely with that pre-9/11 world, a world that went away quickly when the planes hit the towers. Gleefully stupid nihilism was quickly replaced by even stupider militarism and a wild thirst for revenge. A nation saw the illusion of post-Soviet invincibility shattered in front of their eyes and got in their feelings about everything. Immaturity was over. Blink-182 started making emo albums.

But while Fred Durst found himself playing cruise lines, Jackass endured. The first movie, which splits its time between classic stunts in the States and pranks in Tokyo, scored $79.5 million on a $5 million budget, priming the pump for the second movie, which is one of the most depraved and wild things to ever appear in a multiplex. We’re talking “Chris Pontius drinks horse semen”-levels of depraved, here.

Why did Jackass last through The Great Sobering? Well, one reason is plain and simple: It is really, really, viscerally funny in a way that requires absolutely no cultural subtext. It’s a little world in itself, with codes and rules engineered to create slapstick. Jackass is eternal.

You watch a riot control mine go off. It’s loud. Dave England, usually up for all kinds of wild shit, is harrowed by the scale of the mine. Ryan Dunn (RIP) is trying to get out of it, but Knoxville, silver-tongued devil that he is, talks him into it. They stand in front of the bomb, set it off, get absolutely wrecked, and then you spend a while watching them writhe after making the conscious decision to stand in front of a riot control mine. Margera, who not a minute ago was hopping around like a jerk, collapses to the ground and mutters the immortal line, “I ride a fucking skateboard, I don’t get shot.” (The contrast between Bam’s side-project persona, a bad boy who does what he wants, and his craving for Knoxville’s approval in Jackass is one of the series’ most textured features.) Knoxville, who seems invincible after taking this shot, shows off his hideous welts. Then he tells a corny showbiz joke about keeping the face nice and clean. Next.

What’s this about? Well, mostly, it’s about watching guys get messed up by a riot control bomb of their own volition, which is funny in the way that Wile E. Coyote is funny. The galaxy brain it requires to find out about the mine, commit yourself to stand in front of the mine, and trigger the mine with your own hand, well, that level of commitment to structured pain has had comic juice since time immemorial. Steve-O went to clown college, for Christ’s sake.

But there’s also the relational and psychological aspect of Jackass—the fuel that really feeds the fire. This construction isn’t just a slapstick journey to the limits of taste. It’s also about their relationships—to themselves, and to the work, and to each other, and how these things are always colliding. We see Dunn sit outside the warehouse, trying to draw a line. Knoxville, always the alpha in the group, tries to use logic to convince Dunn. “All you gotta do is stand there!”

“Yeah,” replies Dunn. “And get killed! Look at that thing, that thing blew the hell up!”

“It’s just loud, it’s loud,” replies Knoxville, playing producer. “It’s gonna hurt real bad, but it’s just loud.”

“You’re nuts,” says Dunn.

His resolve is clearly shrinking.

“C’mon,” offers Knoxville. “It’s footage.”

The very next shot, there’s Dunn, having conceded to Knoxville’s psychotic pitch. I’ve always been fascinated by “it’s footage”—the light, passive jostle against Dunn’s defenses. He is invoking the spirit of the project; the weird set of rituals they’ve concocted to make this thing that made them all famous.

In “Why is it the things that make you a man tend to be such dumb things to do?”: Never-Ending Adolescence and the (De)stabilization of White Masculine Power on MTV*, a chapter from Emily Chivers Yochim’s 2002 book Skate Life: Reimagining White Masculinity, Yochim analyzes the ways the Jackass crew challenge and egg each other on through the lens of Judith Butler’s conception of gender as a performance, and really nails the strange way the crew shifts back and form between mocking and confirming their masculinity through these weird rituals they perform, verbally recognizing how stupid these feats of strength are, all while doing them and egging on everyone else to do them too. It’s a self-replicating system of proving oneself over and over, sort of like in real life when society demands men wear pants all the time and we all just acquiesce and perpetuate the rule through our adherence.

This push and pull is evident in the aforementioned segment where Pontius drinks fresh horse cum. Right before he tosses it back, he speaks with Tremaine, the movie’s director. “If I do this,” he says, “this gives me an out for something bad I’m gonna do in the future.” Then the two of them shake on it, and there he goes, swilling that jizz.

Not to sound like Rod Dreher, but I’m fairly certain that masculine tropes don’t usually include “drinking animal semen.” But Pontius, who is the member of the crew most apt to avoid getting hurt (“My job on this show is to be naked, not kill myself,” he remarks in an episode of the TV show), makes a weird deal here: I will absolutely debase myself doing something revolting and vaguely zoophilic, but also physically harmless, in exchange for safe harbor from one of these weird, masochistic stunts that I have inducted myself into doing in service to the bizarre code of toughness we have created. He is drinking horse cum to give himself a credit against a future act where he will be expected to ironically-but-also-sincerely validate his masculinity in the collective through self-inflicted violence. Systems on systems on systems, all ending in a guy drinking horse jizz.

This is all to say that, in addition to the bone-crunching hits, Jackass is also funny in the way gender and society are funny. What are these guys doing? What’s with these codes and rules they’ve sworn to uphold? How do they still appear to like, even love each other while they’re all each others’ tormentor?

In Jackass 3D, the third movie (A 3D feature released at the height of the Avatar-fueled 3D-movie craze of the early 2010s), there is a segment where everyone except Johnny and Wee-Man are compelled to walk through a hallway full of activated tasers and cattle prods. There’s a shot where you see “Danger” Ehren McGhehey blankly stare at the setup, replaying everything in his life that has led him to this moment, dreading the nightmarish pain he is about to subject himself to for laughs. It is a moment of pure dread that someone has opted to subject themselves to. The way in which that look in his eyes is funny is unmatched by anything else anyone else has ever made. It goes beyond theater, beyond acting. It doesn’t even have the pretenses of masochistic performance art. It is pure fear, conjured up for the purpose of shits and giggles.

These rituals, this performance, never feels cruel. They all like each other, and carry themselves like longtime friends. Starting with 3D, the entire cast was required to do the movie sober as a way of supporting Steve-O, who went to rehab and cleaned himself up in 2008 after an intervention from Tremaine and Knoxville. That’s supportive friendship. The knowledge that they’re facing this stone sober for the first time, along with the specter of age visibly bearing down on everyone involved, gives that movie some extra juice and odd poignance the earlier work doesn’t have. The content itself is eternal, but the years have given these antics a warm, strange depth. You see in their friendships and co-dependencies the ways that people who have known each other for a long time make each other tick.

Whenever Jackass blesses us with its return you can sense the passage of time in their lives. But as far as the broader culture influencing how things happen on screen? Absolutely not. Every entry feels like it was pulled straight from 2000, right at the end of the end of history. It was nothing like the mourning wails and self-immolation of the aughts, and it’s nothing like the hyperaware, identity-confirming, algorithm-driven culture of today. It’s just this eternal thing, slapstick and a big, dumb psychological game, universally enjoyable and valid in any climate you watch it in.

In Jackass, there is truly nothing out there that has less to do with anything someone might post about: the rise of Trump, the function of the economy, cancel culture. It’s unthinkpieceable. That look of dread in Danger Ehren‘s eyes goes so far beyond “events.” It is the human form, the same one we’re all dragging around, considering its own immolation and quivering in fear. The fact that he has been slowly coaxed into doing it to himself? Well, that’s what makes it funny. It doesn’t defy the asinine culture it grew out of​​—the giggly nihilism and willful immaturity. It puts that suit on and dances into eternity.