In the beginning, there was Big Brother. A skateboarding magazine founded in the early 1990s and best known for its gimmicky formatting, rampant nudity, and shock media gambits such as publishing instructions on how to commit suicide, Big Brother gained a cult following among Southern California’s skaters, nihilists, and general weirdos — among whom was a lanky Tennessean transplant named Philip John Clapp, better known to the world as Johnny Knoxville.
Knoxville, an aspiring actor and writer with an affinity for 1970s kitsch daredevils such as Evel Knievel, would eventually spin one of his stunts for the magazine, a series of self-inflicted “tests” of self-defense equipment culminating in his shooting himself in the chest while wearing a bulletproof vest, into a full-fledged media empire over the course of more than two decades. Jackass, the early 2000s hit MTV series featuring ill-advised, life-threatening stunts and vulgar pranks from Knoxville and his skate-world buddies, would improbably inspire a five-film franchise that’s grossed more than half a billion dollars in box-office receipts worldwide, the latest with this month’s installment after a hiatus of more than a decade, Jackass Forever.
It’s not every day that something as overtly hostile to the mainstream as Big Brother begets a global moneymaking enterprise. On the other hand, it’s hard to think of anything that has endured comedically across history’s great expanse more than the Jackass franchise’s bread and butter: people injuring themselves, painfully, frequently in the testicles. The rakish, slacker charm of the show’s cast is combined with the extremity of its stunts to make the show a legitimate hit instead of just a cult curio. To become a true cultural phenomenon, it had to strike an even deeper chord. The moral panic that greeted the show was rooted in a simple question, with an answer that’s unexpectedly relevant two decades later: Why would anyone do these things to themselves? And furthermore, how can I keep my sons from getting any ideas?
Whether to prove their bravery, establish their dominance, impress women, or all of the above, men have put themselves in harm’s way on purpose since before there were wheels under which they could be crushed. The particular context in which Knoxville and the rest of the crew developed this tendency, however, adds a crucial wrinkle to what would otherwise be simple macho-posturing. The ethos of American punk rock, especially in California, has always been more based in a critique of a perceived shallow, phony, consumerist culture, more so than said punks’ social-minded British progenitors. Black Flag parodied homophobic, binge-drinking jocks. The Misfits embraced 1950s occult junk culture as an antidote to the Reagan era’s synthetic sheen. Suicidal Tendencies gleefully stoked parents’ anxieties about teenage drug use and depression.
Skateboarding culture developed hand in hand with that music scene, almost as important as the music itself. Both were puckish, vaguely self-destructive reactions to the prevailing mode of 1970s masculinity — think Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, coiffed immaculately, out of his mind on Quaaludes, begging some doe-eyed 16-year-old to squeeze his lemon until the juice runs down his leg. Punk and skate culture were avenues through which dissatisfied young men could express their testosterone-fueled urges without reproducing the excesses of their opulent, materialistic predecessors. By the time the Jackass franchise developed in the late 1990s, the players had changed, but the dynamic was the same: the self-deprecating humility of the skate punk served as a refreshing contrast to that era’s bleatingly depressive, self-serious post-grunge rock culture.
Skate punk might have been born in the overdeveloped, concrete-slabbed wastelands of Southern California, but it would resonate most deeply in the areas across the country where these cultural battles most frequently play out: the suburbs. For understimulated, disaffected teenagers across the country, there was something elementally resonant about the desperation that was just below the surface of the crew’s attempts at making its own “fun.” Many of the show’s initial stunts were staged in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the anonymous far exurb of Philadelphia and hometown of foundational crew member Bam Margera. The suburban ennui the show captured made it thrilling to its fans and even more mystifying to its detractors: How could these nice young men, born into the most affluent and comfortable decade in the history of the world’s most affluent and comfortable nation, be so willing to play fast and loose with their own lives?
Growing from an MTV hit into a top box-office film franchise, it became increasingly distant from that homespun ethos, upping the ante with more and more high-concept and elaborate stunts. Jackass Forever maintains that trend, but it brings the franchise’s concept back to Earth with an unexpected innovation: inducting a younger generation of daredevils into the crew’s ranks, some of whom were the very children whose parents feared their emulating the show in its original incarnation. With most of the original cast now solidly middle-aged — Knoxville is 50, sporting a shock of white hair — one could view the move as an act of self-preservation if nothing else. But the original cast members are as game as ever for violent self-injury, and sharing the stage with a group of Gen Zers and millennials who share that thirst is unexpectedly revealing of how subcultures like the one that created Jackass endure and remake the mainstream in their own image.
The stunts depicted in Jackass Forever are just as morbidly entertaining, and in some cases even more extreme, than those in the preceding films. Steve-O, the franchise’s effective mascot and most shameless glutton for punishment, allows his genitals to be used as a makeshift beehive. Knoxville, the crew’s captain and Knievel stand-in, is shot out of a massive cannon into a lake. Various crew members are trapped in a pitch-black room laden with booby traps reminiscent of nothing so much as Home Alone and made to believe a poisonous rattlesnake is lurking nearby. “Danger” Ehren McGhehey, the perennial whipping boy, is covered in honey and salmon and presented to a bear, and later he tests an athletic cup against shots from professional athletes including UFC heavyweight Francis Ngannou. You feel their pain.
The new crew members get their own licks in, variously rolling around bare-skinned in a cactus patch, taking scorpion stings to the lips, and repeatedly crashing and burning, un-helmeted, on skateboards, bicycles, treadmills, and the like. While the new generation’s stunts are equal to their elders’ in pain, they present in aggregate one very noticeable difference: It’s a far more diverse crew, including several black stunt performers and the franchise’s first woman.
The difference between the two cohorts reveals both the extent to which the culture that birthed the original Jackass has proliferated throughout the world and the endurance of its subversive ethos. Rookie Jasper Dolphin is an alumnus of the rap collective Odd Future, whose skate obsession and transgressive button-pushing are perfectly aligned with the project (the group’s ringleader, Tyler, the Creator, also makes an appearance). Eric Manaka is a skateboarder and young actor who clicked with Knoxville on the set of his 2018 vehicle Action Point. Rachel Wolfson is a comedian who impressed the original cast with her debauchery-laden Instagram comedy. Other newbies include Zach Holmes, a fanboy from Indiana who dubbed himself “Zackass” in a series of viral videos, and a vaguely Zac Efron-like man who calls himself “Poopies.”
The foxhole-borne camaraderie among the two generations is apparent and weirdly life-affirming. The original cast, a group of demographically similar men brought together by their participation in a niche subculture, created something that powerfully expressed a series of near-universal desires: to transcend your mundane surroundings, to be tough, to be brave, to know you’re alive. That turned a subculture, the largely white, suburban, male world of skate punk, into a mass-cultural product, available to anyone who shares those desires. The lengths to which the cast and its progeny go to achieve them are extreme but befitting a culture that still offers too few avenues through which to pursue them and proscribes individual possibility by placing young people into pat, group-based boxes.
This might seem to be too weighty a consideration for a film that features a man smashing his penis flat between two slabs of plexiglass and using it as a pingpong paddle. But the world of Jackass is, at its heart, beautifully egalitarian. It invokes a shared catharsis that anyone who has seen the films in a packed theater knows is unique. In the circus Knoxville and his pals have created, your shape, size, height, race, and gender might be a part of what makes you unique or interesting or yourself, but they’re all ultimately secondary. If you’re willing to get into the cannon, you’re going into the lake.
Derek Robertson is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine. Find him at Afternoondelete.com.
