Self-punishment has always been at the heart of physical comedy. One of the secrets of slapstick, for instance, is that a pratfall is rarely painless: its effects on the body are merely delayed by the adrenal excitement of live performance. Over the course of more than a century of filmed gags, the worst results of corporeal damage upon professional funnymen have been well documented. Buster Keaton broke a vertebra in his neck while filming a stunt for his silent masterpiece “Sherlock Jr.” Jerry Lewis blamed a spine-chipping tumble onstage for decades of debilitating agony. Chevy Chase checked into Betty Ford, in 1986, to deal with an addiction to analgesics. It would seem that physical comedians, like athletes and dancers, must eventually pay a price for using their bodies as instruments. “Jackass,” the convulsively hilarious MTV reality-prank franchise, which began as a hit cable series in 2000 and expanded its reach through a decade-plus of feature films, straight-to-DVD releases, and affiliated cast-member projects, has achieved remarkable mileage through its unwavering commitment to embracing this truth. Now much of the original crew have reconvened for a new theatrical release, “Jackass Forever,” which banks on the indignity of middle-aged men enacting new versions of the dangerous and disgusting maneuvers of their long-ago youth.
The “Jackass” formula of documentary comedy has remained consistent since the original television show. Each installment presents a series of astonishingly ridiculous challenges, sometimes captured with covert cameras in public spaces, that a gang of giggling bros inflict upon themselves, the ultimate goal being some outrageous spectacle of pain and humiliation. Thus, for much of the early twenty-first century, the Jackassers spent their time doing things like running after one other with buzzing stun guns, cattle prods, and electric hair clippers; Jet-Skiiing up a skate ramp and over a hillside; eating a snow cone made with urine; attaching a muscle stimulator to their genitals; playing “dodge medicine ball” in the dark; and riding a teeter-totter in a rodeo ring with an angry bull. At times, their shit-eating grins have not been metaphorical.
The original cast emerged, in the nineteen-nineties, out of the nudity-peppered underground skateboarding magazine Big Brother, which featured written and photographed reports of generally less elaborate but no less stupid skater antics, and which eventually produced a series of VHS tapes featuring similar fare. One of these includes a notorious segment in which the L.A.-handsome Johnny Knoxville, then a writer for the publication, pepper-sprays his own eyes, gets shocked by a Taser, and shoots himself point-blank in the chest while wearing a bulletproof vest. After that last endeavor—which Knoxville draws out to an excruciating degree, clicking, Russian roulette-style, through the empty chambers of the pistol—he is seen smiling wildly in the back seat of a car escaping the scene. His T-shirt is smudged black from the impact, but his torso is apparently undamaged. “This crazy rush of adrenaline shot through me,” Knoxville later attested, in the 2017 documentary “Dumb: The Story of Big Brother,” adding that he was “so relieved that I just didn’t die!"
Unsurprisingly, the “Jackass” television show, which followed in Big Brother’s footsteps, generated a great deal of controversy in its day. Although it featured a disclaimer warning viewers not to attempt the actions that they were about to see onscreen, news items began to claim that juvenile fans were committing copycat stunts. A young generation’s access to camcorders might have been more to blame than any single television show. As the millennium approached, the widespread technology fuelled the rise of similarly transgressive D.I.Y. forms, like back-yard wrestling, amateur sex tapes, and gonzo pornography, not to mention the more domesticated violence of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Related activities accelerated sharply with the advent of Internet file sharing and streaming video. This started as early as the heyday of Napster, when street-fight videos were already circulating for a burgeoning audience’s amusement.
Beginning in 2013—a few years after the “Jackass” gang had released its penultimate theatrical film, the visually magnificent “Jackass 3D”—the prank-and-stunt format flourished on the video-sharing app Vine. Viewers who might have gathered to gawk at “Jackass” on television instead trained their eyeballs upon user-generated platforms where access to on-camera teen idiocy had been radically democratized. The urge to record any views-worthy content, no matter how unwise, became immortalized with the slogan “Do it for the Vine.” The go-getting attitude continued past that platform’s demise, in 2017, becoming the basis for today’s supply of YouTuber antics and TikTok challenges.
Since a quick fix of physical comedy is now available via anybody’s smartphone, the return of “Jackass” to the big screen foregrounds activities that only a Hollywood budget could underwrite. Few social-media badasses have the means, as the “Jackass Forever” producers do, of deploying jet bombers to frighten their pals, or hiring an élite blast technician to help them light farts underwater. (The monumental stupidity of putting big money and big tech behind these stunts makes the new film a kind of parodic image of the twenty-first-century tentpole movie.) But “Jackass Forever” doesn’t only have too much money going for it; its stars also have years of practice honing a peculiarly masochistic craft in ways that the franchise’s Zoomer spawn could never. The director, Jeff Tremaine, and the cast and crew have mastered the art of staging and drawing out a cruel gag to its fullest promise. Some of the funniest bits offer dramatic buildups to expected violence, training the camera on the actors so as to showcase their sweating trepidation and, once the experiment is well under way, their pathetic begging and pleading for the game to stop. At moments like this, “Jackass” veers into the territory of psychological torture, like a comedic version of the Milgram experiment.
“Jackass” can also embrace the pornographic and scatological in ways that are far less possible on the visually manicured platforms that dominate the contemporary Internet. Once released from cable-television advertisers, “Jackass” went explicit and visceral, using the big screen to showcase uncensored dicks, shit, semen, and vomit. “Jackass Forever” provides more than a couple towering closeups of penises and testicles covered in burgundy bruises, as a kind of perverted fan service. This attitude is familiar from Big Brother, but the magazine also featured hetero-friendly helpings of naked women. The female presence in “Jackass,” however, has always been minimal. (The inclusion in “Jackass Forever” of a few scenes with the comedian Rachel Wolfson marks a departure.) The result is an atmosphere of intense homoeroticism, as palpable as that found in any fraternity, barracks, or locker room. “Jackass” now seems ahead of its time in depicting a misfit masculinity that allows for a great deal of shared nudity, bodily exploration, and taboo busting, and the inclusion of cameos over the years from the likes of John Waters and the late Rip Taylor brings the occasional element of authentic gay camp.
The key to “Jackass” has always been its joyous vision of resilience in the face of obvious traumas. If the body keeps the score, these guys should be racking up world records—yet they typically bounce back like children made of rubber. (Some of the laugh potential of the men’s advanced age in “Jackass Forever” is undercut by the fact that the bodies of Knoxville, Chris Pontius, Dave England, and Steve-O remain relatively athletic.) Seeing cartoon violence enacted on real people allows the audience a potent taste of that adrenaline rush which Knoxville felt after his self-shooting decades ago: exhilarating laughter follows the performers’ visible release from mortal danger. But now that man-boys have become zaddies, wrinkles and gray hair peppering their unclad forms, “Jackass Forever” tempers this fantasy with more footage of their stunts’ aftereffects, including a sequence in which Knoxville is knocked out from a concussion and rushed to the hospital, emerging bandaged, in a wheelchair. There’s also the question of who isn’t on screen. The cast member Ryan Dunn died in an alcohol-related car accident more than a decade ago, and Bam Margera, who was central to the genesis of the franchise, was excluded from the film for reasons that remain unclear but involve a restraining order issued against him by Tremaine. In 2022, survival through hellish absurdities is something that we’d all like to celebrate, even if laughing in the face of mortality might only ever provide temporary relief.
