The High Art Of Jackass

By Joel Stein/Los Angeles

Johnny Knoxville stumbles into the Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, Calif., shivering and bleeding from his head, woozy with a concussion--but the staff just laughs at him. "Hey, it's Johnny Knoxville!" yells a male nurse. "A stunt must have gone bad, huh?" Knoxville has a blood-soaked gauze tourniquet wrapped around the top of his head and is wearing a pink bathrobe; he looks like a cross-dressing Civil War re-enactor. He needs half a dozen or so stitches to the back of his scalp but decides to leave the hospital when the doctors refuse to let the surgery be filmed. As he signs himself out with a shaky hand, he looks up at the receiving nurses and asks exactly what document he's signing. "Autographs for us," one says. "Can you do this one to my nephews, Paul and Anthony?"

Knoxville (who uses his real name, P.J. Clapp, off-camera) has made a career for himself by damaging his body in spectacular ways. Until Ozzy Osbourne let cameras into his living room, Knoxville's show, Jackass--it's named for the idiocy of the stunts performed on it--was MTV's most popular program ever. In it, Knoxville and his skateboarding pals would go on adventures like shooting one another with stun guns, sitting in a well-used Porta Potti while it is flipped upside down and competing in a hard-boiled-egg-eating-and-barfing contest. If you are of a certain gender and age, this is the funniest stuff in the world. Knoxville created a new kind of comedy, one in which he gets laughs not out of the audience's surprise but their discomfort.

Though Knoxville and his band of modern-day Knievels made only 25 episodes (the series was cut short after running into criticism from parents and Senators), their craft lives on, not only in imitation homemade, backyard-wrestling-style tapes advertised in late-night cable commercials but also in their final project: a new MTV film, Jackass: The Movie, opening this week. The movie differs from the TV show mostly in that it will be shown in theaters.

Knoxville has already scored decent roles in movies like Men in Black II and has signed a deal with Fox for a possible sitcom, so it's not really clear why a 31-year-old man with a wife and a daughter would want to do this to himself one last time. "A lot of stand-up comedy guys, when they get a little famous, just give up their stand-up career, and it cancels out the thing that set them apart," said Knoxville in his Hollywood film-production office as he was shooting the last few scenes of the movie. "They give it up, and they're middle-of-the-road."

The Jackass film office is a mess. Two dogs run around. The doorbell rings, and the secretary, busy trying to work the typewriter, yells for someone to open the door. Two workmen arrive to replace the broken conference table for the fourth time. The director of photography shows up for his 9 a.m. call at 2:45 p.m., and he hasn't missed anything. Half-empty bottles of whiskey lie everywhere. It's a brief glimpse into what the world would look like if it were run by high school dropouts.

But when the cameras are on, like their Survivor and Fear Factor brethren, the performers come alive. Among the segments in the film is one in which Knoxville's friends administer paper cuts to the webbing of his feet and hands before submerging them in an aquarium full of rubbing alcohol. In another, Steve-O, who had never walked a tight-rope, walks one over a lake swarming with alligators. (He falls after two steps but somehow avoids getting hurt.) One has Magera, known for traumatizing his father on the show, breaking into the bathroom while his father is on the toilet and beating him up. Today's segment stems from the following idea: Wouldn't it be funny to walk into a sporting-goods store with a buddy, rip open some boxing gloves and have a go at it in the aisle? If you're of a certain gender and age, the answer is a resounding yes!

For the match, Knoxville has flown in the aptly named Butterbean, a 350-lb. professional boxer. Butterbean also seems excited about the prospect of knocking out Knoxville. "This is going to be fun," he says.

"You'll have fun. I don't know what this 'we' stuff is," Knoxville says.

When the two vans of Jackasses arrive at the Big 5 Sporting Goods store in Carson, Calif., to tape the bit, director/co-creator Jeff Tremaine is angry. Despite a prior warning to the owner to keep the taping secret, the place is crawling with teenagers. And because Knoxville is the anti--Carson Daly, the new James Dean for cool kids, he is always bumrushed for autographs, which ruins the sketch because it undermines the whole concept of Jackass: horrifying unsuspecting bystanders. To fix this, the crew went to Japan and Mexico to tape much of the movie, and now Tremaine is bailing on the Big 5 to head up to the Van Nuys Bazaar Swap Meet, which is free of kids.

There, two members of the troupe introduce the fight to the confused shoppers. Butterbean hits Knoxville, sending him down. Knoxville gets up twice before going down for good. As Knoxville falls the third time, his skull catches the corner of a jewelry counter, and blood spurts from his head, creating a growing pool on the carpet. Knoxville, who does not snore, is snoring in his concussion. The set medic runs over and wraps gauze around his head. No one is laughing. In person, this is not funny.

But the Jackass team is pumped. For them, this is like Brando nailing a scene. When Knoxville comes to, they walk him outside the swap meet and prop him up against a wall. "I'm Johnny Knoxville. Come see the movie, and you'll see why I have to get stitches," he says clearly, in what turns out to be his last completely lucid moment of the day. That's when Cindy Mendoza, 15, spots him. "Dude, it's Jackass. Dude, I watch your show every night at 10. How come you didn't bring Steve-O? Dude."

Back in the van, on the way to the hospital, Knoxville asks for his robe. "I'm freezing," Knoxville says, shivering. "Did we get the shot?" At the hospital Knoxville is questioned by a nurse, and spouts his well-memorized insurance information. Director of photography Dimitry Elyashkevich tapes all of this. But after the doctor tells Knoxville that he can't film the procedure, Elyashkevich says, "We're taking our gash elsewhere."

Knoxville heads back to Beverly Hills to see his personal doctor, who diagnoses a mild concussion and doesn't balk at the filming of the five stitches he sews into the back of Knoxville's head. As Knoxville dizzily hobbles off, he turns around to say goodbye to the journalist who's been sharing the bloodbath of a day with him. Without a trace of irony, he says, "Take care of yourself, man."