You always hurt the ones you love

By T.M. Brown, CNN

(CNN) — One byproduct of getting older is that injuries hurt more and last longer. Inflammation prevents broken bones from knitting themselves back together correctly so that they look like gnarled wood. Old and new traumas compound to create new, mysterious sources of pain. Cells divide lethargically, which slows the closing of cuts and healing of bruises. Some cells even grow senescent, forgetting how to replicate at all.

Johnny Knoxville’s body knows those lessons all too well. The 55-year old “Jackass” ringmaster does a lot fewer stunts that he used to. In the 2022 film “Jackass Forever,” he gets hooked and tossed by an enraged bull, going heels over his now-silver head. He suffered a concussion and a brain hemorrhage, leading doctors to bar him from stepping into the arena with enraged bovines. There are no bulls in “Jackass: Best and Last,” a film being billed as the final installment of a three-decade project to see how badly a group of friends can get themselves injured while having fun and not dying.

It all started nearly 30 years ago, when a teenager named Bam Margera and his crew of friends in suburban southeast Pennsylvania started putting out a series of homespun skateboarder VHS tapes called “CKY,” which mixed footage of kickflips over trash cans with stunts like jumping off a two-story building into a dumpster. In the abridged version of the story, Knoxville, the director Spike Jonze and Jeff Tremaine, editor of the iconoclastic skateboard magazine “Big Brother,” saw the videos and recognized the potential entertainment value in pain. They met with Margera, shot some demo footage and sold the concept to MTV.

The TV show that resulted, “Jackass,” only ran from 2000 to 2002, but gave the world a cast of characters that are part pro wrestling roster and part reality TV. Along with Knoxville and Margera, there’s Steve-O — born Stephen Glover — a professionally trained circus clown who takes on the most harrowing stunts, like trying to tightrope-walk across an alligator pit. Chris Pontius specializes in getting half naked, if not more, assuming the persona of “Party Boy” to wear tearaway tracksuits with only a thong and bowtie underneath. Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, a professional skateboarder with dwarfism, and Preston Lacy, a heavily built comic, team up to highlight their difference in size: on a tandem bungee jump in Miami, Acuña goes first and Lacy doesn’t budge; Lacy then leaps and Acuña is snapped back into the water as if launched from a slingshot.

For a generation of people — mostly and specifically, adolescent boys — the brief, anarchic televised run of “Jackass” landed with the exhilarating force of a shopping cart ramming into a hedge, if not the life-changing power of puberty itself. In my own middle school, where I’d landed back in the United States after a decade of moving around, “Jackass” offered a break from my new-kid efforts to fit into the hierarchies of taste (Limp Bizkit, yes; Tom Petty, no). Everyone loved it, without pretense, staying up late to watch it and then plotting our own stunts the next day.

Some of the young people watching “Jackass” then are now throwing their own bodies around in the Jackass troupe. Odd Future co-founder Jasper Dolphin and comedian Rachel Wolfson have been dragooned into the crew to keep the franchise going. In “Best and Last,” Dolphin and Knoxville dress up in suits and ties and get locked in an office with a bighorn sheep, which seems to take particular umbrage with Dolphin. He gets rammed over and over again, to the point he wonders aloud if the ram is racist.

“I usually don’t ask too many questions,” Dolphin said. “So when I would get to the set it would always be, ‘Oh, I wonder what’s gonna happen today.’”

Dolphin, who debuted as a “Jackass” player in 2022’s “Jackass Forever,” said that he was a little nervous when he first started filming, but the feeling quickly dissipated. “Once we started rolling, it was a lot of fun,” he said.

‘Live-action Tom and Jerry’

Prank shows are almost as old as network television. “Candid Camera” debuted on ABC in 1948; one of the first gags featured a hidden microphone in a corner mailbox that asked people if they had paid for enough postage. The show ran off and on for nearly 70 years, but kept the jokes rated PG to satisfy network censors and mass audiences. “Jackass,” running on cable, could feature someone getting upended inside a full portable toilet or going snorkeling at a sewage treatment plant.

“Jackass: The Movie” came out in 2002 and was a minor hit, grossing nearly $80 million globally. The movie-sized production budget only changed the scale of the stunts: the opening credits sequence features the whole crew riding in a supersized shopping cart as cannons fire rubble at them, before they eventually crash into a vendor stand.

The cartoony aspect was deliberate. Jonze, who worked on all five official Jackass films as well as others under the “Jackass Presents” rubric, told The Guardian that they wanted to create a “live-action Tom and Jerry.”

The movies kept coming, as did spinoffs featuring different cast members, including the heartwarming and disturbing “Wildboyz,” in which Pontius and Steve-O ventured out into nature to find new ways to harm or terrify themselves. Both of them are animal lovers and conservationists — Steve-O runs the Radical Ranch, an animal sanctuary in Tennessee. Watching them nervously giggle as they walk around a Kenyan game preserve looking for venomous snakes provides a slightly different thrill than watching them get hit in the groin with a baseball.

The crude antics fed a fanbase that extended to the heights of cinema. On Steve-O’s podcast, John C. Reilly said that he’s been a “massive fan” since the beginning, and that he introduced his friend Paul Thomas Anderson to the show. The shock-comedy auteur John Waters compared the pranks to his own most notorious masterpiece: “‘Jackass’ is the closest movie to ‘Pink Flamingos’ ever made.”

Like the stunts themselves, sitting in a theater for “Jackass” is a communal experience. “Watching your friends and people you don’t know all screaming and cry and laugh at the same thing makes it special,” Dolphin said.

Almost 25 years after the first “Jackass” movie, “Best and Last” is a swan song for the original cast who are finally hanging up their rocket skates and tasers in exchange for a hopefully less painful life. The film introduces a few new stunts, including a hellish escape room and a particular vile game of Twister, but is more like a greatest-hits album with interstitial on-set commentary from Knoxville, Pontius and Steve-O.

Some of the scenes will be familiar to dedicated fans, including when Margera gets slapped with a tire-sized artificial hand loaded with bags of flour or when Knoxville and Steve-O harass golfers with air horns. But there are a few never-before-seen gems from the vault, including the exceptionally dangerous stunt that served as the creative starting gun for the entire franchise.

The Harvard anthropologist Elaine Scarry wrote in her widely celebrated 1985 book “The Body in Pain” that “physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution.” Scarry was writing specifically about the malicious infliction of pain on others, such as how torture is intended to destroy a victim’s sense of reality. (When asked if she had ever seen “Jackass,” Scarry said I was “the first person to alert me to its existence.”)

The driving force in “Jackass,” though, is friendship rather than malice. The cast members have a clear affection for one another and with that bond they represent an increasingly rare species: a set of men that share deep friendships.

“It’s natural. You do dumb stuff with your friends and you laugh about it,” Dolphin said. “Something as simple as pushing your friend into a bush. Like it’s not that crazy, but you’re gonna laugh and have a great time doing it.”

Dana Vessel, a sports radio host in Minneapolis, remembers how immediately appealing the cast’s physical camaraderie was when he started watching the show in middle school in the early 2000s. “It was just guys being dudes, and there was this universally appealing aspect of it where we felt a part of something simply by watching,” he said. “You got the feeling that these guys would have been doing this even if there weren’t cameras around.”

“I found that so attractive,” said Alex Sciarra, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles who has been watching “Jackass” since she was a teenager. Sciarra said that Knoxville and the rest reminded her of the boys in the skatepark she and her friends would flirt with after school. She was among a handful of women I talked to about their “Jackass” fandom who all said there was something magnetic about a group of young men who were confident in their goofiness and cared about one another.

“There was nothing performative about their relationships, they were just hanging out and having fun,” Sciarra said.

“You see them getting hurt, but they’re also having the best time ever and I think that’s a huge part of the appeal,” said Casey Tebo, 51. He pointed towards the franchise’s many guest stars, including Brad Pitt who was mock abducted in the second movie. “Everyone wanted to be a part of it because it was such a fun collective thing to do,” Tebo said.

‘There’s just no humanity left on the prankster side’

“Jackass” opened the door for a new generation of cable network prank shows like “Punk’d” and “Impractical Jokers.” But the shows that followed seemed more interested in doing things to people, whereas the pranks on “Jackass” were a two-way street.

YouTube provided another turn of the screw for the genre, and prankstreamers became some of the platform’s biggest stars. Personalities like the Nelk Boys and Logan and Jake Paul initially gained popularity because of their ever-more-edgy gags, which often make civilians — “marks” in the prankster vernacular — the butt of the joke. The main goal for this new generation was to go viral at all costs.

“In ‘Jackass’ the joke is always on us and now with these streamers the point is to be mean to people,” Wolfson said.

Wolfson pointed to a recent TikTok video that captured Pontius standing by the roadside in the aftermath of a car wreck. An internet video maker filmed himself walking past Pontius’ mangled car to confront the more famous prankster, repeating “You know you’re not allowed to park here” in intentionally witless tones, to Pontius’ rising irritation. One of the video’s hashtags is #ragebaiter; Wolfson said that Pontius’ wife and their child were in the car at the time.

“Everyone has a base amount of empathy, and you can tell that these guys who go out to irritate random people are just annoying, not funny,” said Boone Tebo, Casey’s 16-year-old son. He first started watching “Jackass” with his father, and soon Boone and his friends were exchanging favorite clips.

“It just makes you want to go spend time with your friends and make memories with them even if it involves doing dumb shit,” he said. (Yes, Boone and his friends have tried to recreate some of the stunts.)

Casey Tebo, who is closer in age to Knoxville, said that he recognized “Jackass” as a specifically Gen X cultural product. “We were all unsupervised. Our parents told us to get out of the house and we’d have to entertain ourselves,” he said. When he introduced Boone to the show, the magnetism was obvious and immediate. “There’s something so endearing about having your crew around you,” he said. “One of the most endearing things for teenage boys in ‘Jackass’ is how much they laugh with one another.”

There are some notable absences in “Best and Last.” Margera and Knoxville had a public falling out after Margera was kicked off the set of “Jackass Forever” for violating a sobriety agreement. Margera has struggled with substance addiction for many years, and Knoxville said that the agreement was a gesture of love for his longtime friend. “I know that a lot has happened. I just want him to get well for himself and his family. I love the guy, and I want him to get well and stay well,” Knoxville said in 2022. Ryan Dunn, part of the original “CKY” crew and a fan favorite, died in a drunk driving accident in 2011. Several of his stunts are included in “Best and Last,” and they serve as a visual elegy for a lost friend.

The “Jackass” crew was never scrupulous about avoiding cruelty. The running gag of Margera harassing his dad, including beating the hell out of him while he’s in the bathroom, struck even the adolescent version of me as both malicious and uncreative. There’s a similar tension in a montage from the first film where they cause mayhem by running through Tokyo in panda costumes and slamming each other into storefront displays and street vendors. But the balance of the scene is them joking around with locals in a way that at least feels consensual. When they stumble across a group of shirtless men doing some sort of coordinated exercise routine, they all join in, locals and visitors all clearly having a blast.

Even the worst aspects of that scene hold up against the YouTuber Logan Paul’s tour of Japan in 2017, which included Paul and his team hostilely pressing pedestrians to eat raw fish and octopus, and bottomed out with them giggling over an encounter with a dead body on a visit to Aokigahara forest, an area at the base of Mount Fuji that has been the site of many deaths by suicide. Paul apologized after an international outcry and YouTube’s decision to remove him from a preferred advertising program; eventually, he moved away from prank humor into shock-jock political commentary.

“It’s all for them, it’s not for the audience. It’s all about clicks and baiting people into reactions,” Wolfson said. “There’s just no humanity left on the prankster side.”

At the beginning of “Best and Last,” Knoxville and Pontius arrive at the studio lot for what is their final day of shooting “Jackass.” A producer asks Knoxville how he’s feeling. “Sad,” he says. Knoxville is at the end of a near 30-year run of being paid to hang out with his friends. The main cast’s bodies are beat up and exhausted; Knoxville is banned from more physically demanding stunts because of his run-in with the bull in “Jackass Forever.” He settles for getting electrocuted a few times.

As the credits rolled over a series of outtakes and B-roll, I felt a pang of nostalgia for the wonderful stupidity of my own adolescence and the friends who defined it. The final clip features Knoxville and Tremaine sitting on a motel bed, debriefing after a particularly dangerous stunt. The footage is grainy, and both the men look decades younger.

“That’s exactly what I didn’t want,” Tremaine says, worried about his friend and collaborator’s well-being.

Knoxville, exhausted, smiles like a kid getting away with something: “No, but it’s exactly what I wanted.”

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