Jackass: The Movie
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What does it say about American culture that the number one box office smash for two weeks in a row features grown men shooting bottle rockets out of their assholes? Jackass: The Movie will be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen the insanely -- insanely -- popular TV show on MTV, only this time the jackasses are given carte blanche to say dirty words, get as naked as they want to, and go to even more extreme measures to ruffle the plumage of the bourgeoisie. [1] For those of you so out of the loop as to be unaware of the Jackass franchise, imagine one of your buddies from high school -- the one who perfected the wedgie and the Indian burn and the nuggie and the pull-my-finger joke well ahead of the rest of your classmates -- on extremely potent crystal methamphetamine. With an audience of millions. For an hour and a half straight. These guys (no girls -- chalk up another one for the feminists) go to exorbitant limits to inflict the most ludicrous amount of pain on themselves and those around them possible, all to provoke a gut-wrenching laugh or a hasty trip to the bathroom. [2]

There’s nothing really “movie” about Jackass: The Movie, save for the heavily choreographed and laughably fake-looking opening and closing stunt spectaculars. It’s really just an uncensored and extended version of the TV show. Some of the segments include a guy taking a dump in a hardware store toilet [3], a midget kicking himself in the face, a race car and an anus, guys in giant panda suits running amok on the streets of Japan, a urine sno-cone, and a near-fatal golf cart crash. The jackasses exhibit superhuman capacity for pain and a subhuman willingness to do almost anything for money. It’s grotesque. Shreds of humanity occasionally pierce the absurdity, as when Johnny Knoxville, leader of the jackasses, is visibly shaken by said golf cart crash and human sideshow Steve-O refuses to participate in one stunt on grounds that his dad’ll never talk to him again. But, in general, Jackass: The Movie is an excruciating exercise in one-upsmanship, continually raising the masochistic bar. [4]

So what’s so funny? The humor springs from a mixture of practical joke and watching-someone-fat-or-otherwise-beleagured-fall-down-in-public. Schadenfreude for the masses. [5] We watch for the same reason we can’t avert our eyes from the scene of an accident or we gave the quiet, strange kid a quarter to eat a bug in elementary school. There’s an element of the sadist in all of us. We’re a nation of rubberneckers, whether it’s footage of 9/11 or America’s Funniest Home Videos. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but when we fork over eight dollars a pop to see footage of firecrackers whistling out of some guy’s asshole, the joke’s ultimately on us.


[1] Which, in case you’ve forgotten about Beavis and Butthead, South Park, Crank Yankers, Adam Sandler, The Man Show, every Farrelly brothers movie, Fear Factor, Andy Dick, and The Tom Green Show, is pretty much the common suit of modern entertainment (you’d almost have to make a movie with no naked cursing eight-year-old turds to muss the exhausted feathers of our drooling middle class common denominator nowadays).

[2] To vomit violently, that is. A sort of reverse Ex-Lax.

[3] We get a close-up of said dump.

[4]Modern psychologists might even say the pleasure they seem to get out of the damage they do to themselves contains an element of the sexual; if that's the case, it's merely the sexy sound of ka-ching.

[5] I’m not placing myself above anyone. I was sitting around with my friends one day when a buddy told me that he saw two guys in wheelchairs apparently racing down the sidewalk at school. They subsequently crashed and fell out onto the concrete. I laughed until I couldn’t breathe, then I scolded myself for a couple of hours, then laughed again. It’s kind of funny.

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