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My name is Tom, and I am an idiot. I’ve been an idiot almost my entire life, ever since I was old enough to think it was funny and interesting to be one. So there was something sentimental for me in watching Jackass: Best and Last. It’s a final swansong for a 26-year project that is the finest document of idiocy and the Freudian death drive the modern world has seen.
Jackass debuted in 2000, when I was 12 years old. I was already obsessed with professional wrestling. I’d watch grainy VHS-quality videos of Mick Foley matches in awe, as he would jump headfirst into barbed wire, get repeatedly hit in the head with steel chairs or, famously, be thrown off a five-metre steel cage and through a table.
So when Jackass appeared, it was like manna from heaven for my friends and I. Now we had less impossibly jacked, more down-to-earth heroes to look up to. Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O and Bam Margera all seemed like the kind of normal dudes you’d see at a local skate park or cracking jokes at a house party, only American.
Of course, we ignored all the show’s warnings not to imitate it, and immediately started recording ourselves doing stunts. I’ll always remember when my friend Andy jumped off a wall and cut his head open really badly. But in my mind’s eye, he is for ever suspended in mid-air, sun gleaming behind him, never coming down. Another time, I jumped out of a really tall tree and landed in a bog. It stank and I ripped all the skin off my arm. But it was funny, and that was the most important thing. (Reader, needless to say, don’t do this at home.)
As I got older, I desperately thought of ways to monetise this idiocy. Luckily, Vice existed, and that millennial publication seemed to enjoy paying me to pull off outlandish stunts, either in writing or on screen. I ate a fry-up so large I threw up and got beaten up by the world champion of shin-kicking. One time they even put my Wetherspoon’s table number on the Vice Twitter account and made me eat and drink everything that was ordered there. That was some good stupid.
Why did I (and Jackass) do all this? In Philippa Snow’s book Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury As Art and Entertainment, she notes that Jackass “resembles a post-9/11 show, with its giddy violence sometimes mirroring the helpless, hopeless mania that follows serious trauma”. The intense on-screen camaraderie of the Jackass gang, she says, seems to arise from “the muddling of terror and eroticism inherent in being made aware of one’s mortality”.
There might also be a more scientific reason. It’s called the male idiot theory. It was established in a tongue-in-cheek yet scientifically stringent paper in the British Medical Journal, which showed that 88.7% of the winners of the Darwin awards (for people who remove themselves from the gene pool in idiotic ways) were men. “It is puzzling that males are willing to take such unnecessary risks – simply as a rite of passage, in pursuit of male social esteem, or solely in exchange for ‘bragging rights’,” the report states. “Presumably, idiotic behaviour confers some as-yet-unidentified selective advantage on those who do not become its casualties.”
The cast’s utter determination to degrade and belittle themselves is massively at odds with today’s highly filtered, perfection-seeking world. I don’t think any influencer today would be willing to get anally probed by a robot claw like Steve-O does in Best and Last, for example.
Maybe I relate to Jackass so much because I’ve always done the same: been open about my flaws and laughed at them, often before anyone else. What shame is there left when you’ve already pointed out – and documented – the stuff you’re most embarrassed about? It also comes with a sense of camaraderie. These days, I no longer jump into bogs, but I get some of that thrill through things such as combat sports. And I’ve often found my friends through these activities.
Of course, it is by definition not clever to be an idiot. It can only go on so long. There’s a post-credits scene with Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine sitting on hotel beds, in which Tremaine, visibly shaken, laments what was probably another near-death experience. Tremaine says: “You could’ve been killed. It’s dangerous.” Knoxville, trance-like, replies: “I want it to be dangerous. I want it to be dangerous.” That kind of obsession with defying death is not a sustainable way to live.
But as Knoxville’s hero and friend Hunter S Thompson said: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a Ride!’” That’s what being an idiot is all about.
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