The first episode of Jackass is a seminal work of the 21st century. It is titled Poo Cocktail, and features in quick succession the early stunts, pranks and goofs that make up Jackass’s enduring DNA: the show’s breakout star Johnny Knoxville flies out of a cannon into a net; another of its regulars, Bam Margera, roly-polys down a hill through a group of nonplussed golfers while a cameraman giggles from inside a nearby bush; Ehren McGhehey, the most viscerally headlockable man ever committed to film, intercepts someone’s drive-thru order and throws it for a touchdown. Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, painted orange and dressed as an Oompa Loompa, skates down Venice Beach in a way that astonishes a bystander in wraparound shades.
When Jackass first launched on MTV in October 2000, I was 13 and it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Now I’m 34 and, well, there’s a bit in the first episode of Jackass where Knoxville knocks over someone’s drinking water with a fake erection while politely asking: “Where do you get sodas around here?” and it’s still the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Its cast of daredevil idiots took vomiting, falling off things, and brief-but-agonising pain and made it into high art.
The initial run of Jackass was only three seasons and 25 episodes long, but created an outsized ripple. There were spin-off series, a Knoxville Rolling Stone cover, carnivalesque live tours, and a deluge of scare stories saying middle American teens had suffered harrowing injuries while trying to copy the show’s stunts. Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman wrote to MTV’s parent company Viacom urging it to take greater responsibility regarding its programming to help protect children. By the middle of the third season, red tape and cultural handwringing had taken much of the fun out of pushing a man in a shopping trolley down a hill, and Knoxville announced the series would be the last. Jackass, as a TV show, burned bright, then – infinite MTV repeats aside – faded away.
“For the PTSD of filming to subside, it takes three years and eight months,” longtime Jackass director Jeff Tremaine says over Zoom, while Knoxville cackles wildly in a browser window beside him. After the conclusion of the TV series, the main cast reunited for the unofficial send-off, 2002’s Jackass: The Movie. Then, in 2006, Jackass Number Two. You get the feeling that the entire franchise hangs on whether Knoxville feels like it is a good idea to get hit by a bull this year or not, hence the gap until 2010’s Jackass 3D, which really felt like the last instalment.
But then, 10 years later, the old itch came back. “Listen, it’s never not funny to see someone else get hit in the nuts,” Tremaine, who is 55, explains. “There’s a certain cultural moment with Jackass, and it went away for a few years, but TikTok’s got a big thing for physical comedy, YouTube’s all about elaborate pranks. It never goes away.”
In the late 2010s Knoxville invited Tremaine for lunch. “He dropped about a 200-page document,” Tremaine says with a sigh. “We go: ‘Let’s just shoot for two days and just see if it feels right.’ Honestly, five minutes in, we were ready to commit to making a movie.” And lo, pandemic delays aside, Jackass Forever – film number four – is ready to drop.
Jackass Forever arrives at a time when pandemic restrictions have been ladled on top of the usual health and safety precautions. Cast and crew had to break for seven months while Covid raged. On their return, they were summoned to a room to be talked through the latest safety protocols. Only underneath the table was a hyper-inflatable bouncy castle that promptly exploded. “It was an awkward position because you told us we need to take this seriously, but then you just exploded a bounce house on us,” Knoxville tells a giggling Tremaine. “Totally mixed messages.”
Jackass has been swerving inelegantly around health and safety legislation since it began, but there was some arch irony to Covid being a defining safety factor in a film where a baseball gets pitched directly into someone’s nuts. “It’s funny to think about having all these safety protocols to go through just so we could do dangerous shit,” Knoxville explains. “It’s like, ‘OK, wear your mask until you get to the alligator pit and take it off and jump in.’”
Knoxville is 50 now, and has allowed his natural grey to show: fellow Jackass lifers have similarly aged on screen (Steve-O, a gravel-voiced trained clown willing to staple any part of himself to anything, looks LA-healthy with perfect beaming veneers; Chris Pontius, the show’s go-to whenever a stunt involved cheerful nudity, is glossy and muscular like an elder but thoroughbred horse). There is a strange sense of mortality to Jackass now: when Steve-O talks of concussions, it’s with the tired experience of someone who has seen too many X-rays of his own head. But while seeing the players age might change the texture of Jackass, the flavour is still the same: there’s something soothing about knowing that, after 21 years, the core concept hasn’t evolved at all: it’s still just men with high pain tolerance getting hit in the balls and laughing about it. “From the beginning of time, you see someone walk and fall down, even the cavemen are going to laugh, you know?” Knoxville says.
Tremaine jumps in: “But there’s such a genuine bond between all the guys that to me is so funny.” One stunt in the latest movie sees the Jackasses taken in pairs into a room they are led to believe has a rattlesnake in it, then the lights go out and we are plunged into night vision. “The funniest thing is listening to them deal with each other in just the most horrific situation,” Tremaine laughs. “They’re like old married couples, yelling at each other. It’s just so funny how ingrained those relationships are.” Anyone could have feasibly got famous by letting a snake attack their penis back in 2001. The appeal of Jackass was that the gang did it while so visibly being friends.
Forever sees changes to the original cast. Ryan Dunn died in a car crash in 2011. Margera’s near-absence (he appears in a single stunt) is due to his firing over substance abuse problems (his subsequent legal case against Paramount further delayed the release of the film). And while celebrity cameos have always been part of the Jackass identity (Brad Pitt appeared in series three), they are even more numerous now: Forever is studded with gleeful extended appearances from stars who grew up laughing manically as teenagers at the show, such as Machine Gun Kelly and Odd Future’s Jasper Dolphin. They are joined by – gasp! – a woman, in the form of comedian Rachel Wolfson. “Yeah we just brought her in to meet her and she was so game, and so smart,” Knoxville says. “Her mother was the judge who put OJ away!”
Is there anything from Jackass’s past that doesn’t make Tremaine and Knoxville laugh any more? The answer is “not really”, which goes some way to explaining its enduringly puerile appeal. “Not everything works, but by the time we’re shooting, there’s almost always something funny about what we’re shooting,” Jeff says.
“The really gross stuff I don’t find quite so funny any more,” Knoxville – a man who once clambered into a week-old portable toilet to secure an MTV pilot – admits wearily. “That said, I think I turned in some ideas for this that were pretty gross.” Tremaine butts in with an oddly earnest compliment – “You’ve never been much of a poo poo guy” – and Knoxville blushes in faux humility. “Aw, shucks: you say the sweetest things, Jeff.”
So, is this the last time we’ll see Jackass? The term “never say never” is uttered exactly once every 10 minutes over the course of our conversation. Knoxville did take an incredibly heavy knock from a bull in one of the film’s crowning stunts (he and Steve-O were fairly significantly hospitalised over the course of filming). “I got a really gnarly head injury at the end. So I had to get all kinds of tests; I had to see a neurologist and get all these treatments and whatnot. But I feel like a million lira now.” As Tremaine astutely noted, seeing someone else get hit in the balls is always going to be funny. Until it isn’t, you feel, we will always have some form of Jackass.
Jackass Forever is released in UK cinemas on 4 February