|
Professional Jackass
By Scott Harrell
A man steps into a well-used Port-O-Let, which is then upended, showering him in excrement. A man swallows a live goldfish for the purpose of regurgitating it, unharmed, back into its bowl. A man conquers downtown America’s shopping-center fountains in a four-foot kayak. A rail-thin man steps into the ring with a professional boxer, and promptly gets the shit knocked out of him. A man takes a swan dive into a swimming pool filled with elephant dung.
All of these activities are videotaped for the general public’s visual edification. The obvious question, then, is who would want to watch this stuff?
And the obvious answer, of course, is pretty much everybody.
There is nothing as quintessentially watchable as somebody else getting the shaft. From nature, from law enforcement officials, from situations spun suddenly out of control, from whatever. It’s a given, just another quirky little aspect of the human condition – gotta breathe, gotta eat, gotta see another member of our species take a whiffle ball in the crotch, figuratively or literally, every once in a while. It’s cathartic. It’s good for the perspective. Fabricated sticky situations kept our baser voyeuristic appetites sated for a while, but the current proliferation of “reality-based” TV programs seems to indicate that scripted brouhaha is no longer enough.
The pie-in-the-face gag has come a long way.
Anyone could have predicted that MTV’s new half-hour of pranks, stunts, and outrageous behavior, Jackass, would be a hit right out of the box. It easily one-ups the incidental and accidental mayhem of shows like Real TV and Maximum Exposure, simply by asking, and then answering, one key question: why settle for displaying outrageous “real” events when one can engineer them? Forget about sitting around waiting for something suitably intense and telegenic to happen, and then hoping that some housewife caught in with her CamCorder. Just go out and hire a bunch of guys bored enough, unhinged enough, or so starved for attention that they’ll do anything, ANYTHING, in front of a camera. A troupe of contemporary court jesters who would not only gleefully risk abject humiliation and grievous bodily injury, but would also keep coming back with weirder, funnier, and more provocative ways of doing it. Okay, sure. It certainly looks like a winner, at least on paper. But, seriously, where are they going to find an edgy, attractive group of people who also happen to be extreme enough to think stuff like this up?
Actually, they’re all over the place. They’re skateboarders, and they were wreaking video havoc long before MTV, or anyone else outside of their niche, took notice and saw dollar signs. Most of the peripherals of skate culture, from music to fashion to humor, tend to dwell outside the realm of mainstream tastes, excepting those periods when it cycles briefly into vogue. Whether the sport fosters the outlook, or vice versa, is open to debate, but a certain irreverent, in-joking attitude prevails among die-hards, and constitutes the seed from which Jackass was grown.
“Everything about skateboarding completely instills rebellion, disrespect for authority, bodily harm. You hurt yourself skateboarding, you’re vandalizing stuff when you skateboard, you’re breaking rules and everybody hates you. There’s no way to not be antisocial,” explains skater, stuntman, and Jackass cartel member Steve-O Glover. “And the skateboarders are the ones running around with video cameras, trying to make videos to get sponsored [by manufacturers]. So you’ve got more skateboarders than anybody out there with cameras. And they’re already hurting themselves. AND they’re pissing everyone off everywhere they go.”
Glover, a Boca Raton native, grew up dividing his time and love between skateboarding and making a spectacle of himself. He attended the world-famous Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Clown College, drawn to it more by fire-breathing, stilt-walking, and back-flipping than by, say, big floppy shoes and twisting balloons into animal shapes.
“I was more into doing stunts. I never really got all that turned on to comedy through clown college,” he confirms. “But before Jackass, I was doing some stuff like that, just anything that was funny to do in front of a video camera.”
After graduation (“Class of 97,” he reveals), Glover got a job performing with the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop Circus. He simultaneously put in as much time as he could thinking up pranks and stunts he and his friends could tape, and made several appearances in the magazine and home videos produced by skate-centric company Big Brother. It became apparent that his talent for physical feats and cheating injury surpassed his skateboarding ability.
“I’ve never been in the Big Brother videos or magazine actually riding a skateboard. I’m always doing some stunt or something,” Glover says, adding, “I never had my sights set on staying within the skateboard industry at all. The pros are so incredible, I got discouraged from putting all my effort into skating. I know I’ll never really be good enough to be a pro skateboarder. I wanted to branch out, and a lot of stuff I do is specifically not skateboard-related, for that reason.”
Around this time, another fearless upstart began showing up in various skating videos, though with a very different personal style. While Glover, a trained performer, might pull off a heavily physical stunt as easily as he thought up a seriously demoralizing practical joke, Johnny Knoxville’s specialty careened somewhere between the obnoxiously stupid and overtly life-threatening. His most talked-about sequence featured a friend assaulting him with an arsenal of personal-safety devices, from a can of pepper spray (he took it in the face), to a stun gun, to a Tazer (two barbed darts connected by wire to a battery, imbedded in his shirtless abdomen); he capped the clip off by donning a Kevlar vest and being shot in the chest at close range with a .38. According to Glover, word of Knoxville’s exploits spread rapidly around Los Angeles, inspiring rapt interest from television production circles in general, and a certain incredibly hip music-video-director-turned-indie-film-mogul in particular.
“Apparently, [Big Brother video producer] Jeff Tremain hooked Johnny Knoxville up with Spike Jonze, and Spike Jonze helped him put together a reel of all these stunts and stuff. His tape just sort of got passed around Hollywood, and a major bidding war ensued between Comedy Central and MTV over who was going to get the show. MTV won, and they made a pilot,” he recalls. “They called me, and I filmed for the pilot a year ago. And it got picked up. All the people involved, the people that work for Jackass, came straight from Big Brother. It’s the same people that have been doing the skateboard magazine. I’ve been working for them for three and a half years now.”
By now, everyone and their mother has seen at least one episode of Jackass, which is watched every Sunday night by more people than tuned in to this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, and has just been renewed for sixteen more episodes. Everyone loves it. Their mother hates it, but she was unable to look away; such is the beauty of the show, from a ratings and demographics point of view. Any reaction is fine, so long as the viewer hangs around long enough to have one. Whether Jackass is a clever, ironic take on America’s tendency to rubberneck, or just a bunch of morons running around screwing with the normals and trying to get their asses hurt is completely irrelevant. It’s compelling TV either way. And those who label the program malicious or irresponsible aren’t paying enough attention.
“The whole theme of Jackass is, we’re only mean towards ourselves. We don’t harm anyone but ourselves,” Glover affirms. “There’s a certain amount of appropriateness that’s required. Ideas that are totally mean-spirited towards other people aren’t really funny, I think.”
He offers the following example, for better or for worse:
“I went out once with a camera because this guy was telling me about a trick called Poo Handle. You know a car door handle where you stick your fingers up into it, pull it to open the door? [The idea was] to stuff poo up in there, and clean it off with a napkin so they can’t see it, and when they go to open the door they’re knuckle deep in poo. And I did it, you know? Lurking around this parking lot waiting for the people coming back to their car, so I could film them sticking their fingers in poo. I ended up not even getting the shot, but I felt like I just had the worst karma after I did that. That’s where I went too far; it was mean-spirited. If I had put poo on a one-dollar bill and left it on the ground with the good side facing up, and hid in the bushes waiting for someone to pick up the Poo Dollar, then that’s funny, because I can put poo on my own money, and other people don’t have to touch my money. But putting poo on other people’s property really is going too far.”
Obviously, MTV’s legal department is not about to let a segment like Poo Handle slide on into the final edit, Glover’s moral barometer notwithstanding. Which begs the question: how many of this skewed entertainer’s hijinks never get past the watchdogs?
“About eighty percent of all the footage that I have. Even more, to be honest. It’s so hard to get stuff onto the freakin’ show. It can be a pretty small window,” Glover admits.
Given the material that does make the cut, one can either shudder at the thought, or anxiously await Jackass: Too Hot For TV!
THE END
|
