Front Burner - The enduring appeal of Jackass

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Twenty-two years ago, an aspiring actor named Johnny Knoxville teamed up with a group of filmmakers, misfits and daredevils from the underground skateboarding scene — including Jeff Tremaine, Spike Jonze, Bam Margera, Ryan Dunn, Steve-O, and many more. They dared each other to do a series of wild pranks and captured the whole thing on camera and the Jackass universe was born. Their meteoric rise to superstardom is the stuff of legend — and controversy. Now, two decades and many injuries later, they’re still at it. Even as the rest of the world has changed around it, Jackass has managed to stay relevant. Last week, the fourth and potentially final instalment hit theatres and quickly became the number one movie in North America. Today on Front Burner, we talk to senior editor at Rolling Stone, David Fear, to bring you the story of Jackass — a tale of everlasting friendship and chaos.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everybody, Jamie here. So I know that I keep saying this, but we are in Ottawa and we went to a bunch of locations connected to the protest today. The main protest on Parliament Hill, of course, but also a way station and logistic posts as well. We're putting something together for you. It'll

be ready by Friday, but here's a little sneak peek of that. All right. So we've got trucks coming up to the entrance. Another truck. Someone seems to be signaling. Hey, how's it going? How are you? Good, thank you. Good, good, good. We're just, we're just with a podcast and we're just here to check it, check the space out. We want to see what's going on here.

Beautiful. Yeah, can we come in? No. Okay, how come? Go. You're on private property. Please go. Okay.

We just want to come and check this out. I just want you to leave. See what you guys are up to here. I just want you to leave. Okay. Can we ask you a few questions before we leave? No. No? Okay.

Okay. How come? One, you guys like twisting the truth. You guys like to edit things. So please leave. Okay. We don't want to twist the truth here. Good.

We just want to get a sense of what's going on here because it looks like maybe it's a bit of a staging room. Please leave. That's good. Go on there. Okay. Please leave. Thank you, guys. Thanks.

Thanks. You too. Have a good day. I didn't mean to bother you. Peace and love. Thanks. You too. Have a good day. Peace and love. Okay. Every day. Today, we hilariously have an episode about Jackass, so I hope that you enjoy it.

22 years ago, while everyone was listening to Britney Spears and Blink-182, wondering if Tyler Durden was right the whole time, Things you own end up owning you. and waiting to see if Y2K was going to break the world. At the stroke of midnight, January 1st, 2000, elevators may stop. Credit cards and ATMs may cease to function. A then-unknown guy

named Johnny Knoxville fired himself out of a cannon, rode a toboggan down a mountain of gravel, and crashed a bicycle at full speed into a porta-potty while his buddies laughed their heads off, cheering him on. Hello, I'm Johnny Knoxville. Welcome to Jackass. They didn't know it at the time, but they were about to change pop culture forever.

The Jackass universe was born. Their meteoric rise to superstardom is a stuff of legend and controversy. And now, over two decades and many injuries later, they're still at it, and maybe even more popular than ever. Even as the rest of the world changes around it, the Jackass crew remains constant. Last week, the fourth and potentially final installment hit theaters, quickly becoming the number one movie in North America, even beating out Spider-Man. Today on FrontBurner, we're talking to senior editor at Rolling Stone, David Feer, about the enduring power of Jackass, a franchise

that has somehow stayed relevant for two decades. Hi, David. Welcome to the pod. Hi, thanks for having me. So Jackass has been its own industry for 22 years, but to the uninitiated, if you had to describe Jackass to someone who hasn't seen it, how would you describe it? How would I describe Jackass? Okay, so imagine that you're hanging out with a bunch of skate rats and class clowns that

you knew from high school. They're a little bit older. They're still pretty fearless, and they're sitting around. And one of them goes, you know what, I dare you to snort some wasabi. And someone does it. And everyone laughs. And you get a ringside seat viewer. That is jackass. Who are the main guys, the ringleaders in Jackass, for people who might not know? The three guys that you really need to concern yourself with are Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine, and Bam Margera. Johnny Knoxville was this guy from Knoxville, Tennessee.

That's where he took the name. Hi, I'm Johnny Knoxville, and this is the Cub Test. And he went out to L.A. and he decided he wanted to become a star. And he figured that the best way to do this, to get some attention, would be to engineer this stunt in which he essentially was going to test a bunch of self-defense things on himself. He was going to take pepper spray and spray himself in the face and then write about it. And then he was going to take a taser and shock himself and then write about the experience. and then write about it. And then he was going to take a taser and shock himself and then write about the experience

and shoot himself in the chest with a.38 to check and see just how bulletproof this vest was. And that's where the second of the three head jackasses come in. And that's Jeff Tremaine. Jeff Tremaine was an editor at Big Brother Magazine, which was this underground skate magazine that everybody was absolutely enamored of in that circle. And he essentially was like, oh, yeah, we'll do this. I know all these other magazines aren't

going to touch us with a 10-foot pole, but we'll go ahead and run this. It's right up our alley. And Jeff Tremaine ends up becoming a key member. He becomes a director. He directs all the films. And he's also the one that discovers Bam Margera, who's this skate kid from Westchester, Pennsylvania, who is doing this video series called CKY, which is short for Camp Kill Yourself. I'm Bam Margera, and I feel like kicking my dad's ass all day today. Come on, Bam.

I can't do the work. Jerk off. Stop it. It's basically, you know, Jackass before Jackass was Jackass. He's filming skate tricks, but he's also filming pranks. You know, as anyone who's seen the show or the films can tell you, like he loves pranking his parents. There's a lot of that stuff. Tremaine essentially sees these videos that he's putting out and is like, you need to come, you need to come into the Big Brother fold and you need to

meet this Knoxville guy. You guys are like birds of a feather. And it's those three guys really where it kind of forms like the nucleus of what would become Jackass. And you mentioned the skate magazine Big Brother and Bam Margera and his skate videos. Can you tell me a little bit more about how skateboarding influenced like what they were up to? There was a certain type of skate culture that was happening at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s skateboarding had been kind of a big industry like a big business industry at the end of the 80s and that sort of cratered and it went more from like skating on ramps and doing that kind of stuff to street skating and there weren't a lot of magazines for skateboarders that really reflected skateboarding culture the kind of culture around it so you would pick up a magazine like Thrasher, for example, which had a bit of an edge to it, but it was mostly pictorials of people

doing ollies and tricks and ramp verticals and all that kind of stuff. There was no real magazine that kind of picked up on, let's say, the more extreme, goofy, gonzo, vulgar stuff that happened around skating and that's where big brother kind of came in big brother was like like we literally don't care about anything skateboarding happens to be in here but we're going to show you disgusting foul crazy we're going to figure out what can we create that'll make you cringe or blow your mind or your parents will hate or you'll get in trouble for even having this magazine? Though I understand it was influential but also pretty controversial at the time. And why? Right.

Well, the motto for Big Brother was basically a cross between anything goes and go fuck yourself. Well, here's something your children may be reading that you should definitely know about. It's a shocking magazine. It tells you how to commit suicide, tells you all about drug use, and also explicit descriptions of sex. They seem hard to believe, but this magazine is really aimed at kids. They would have full frontal nudity. And it eventually got bought by Larry Flint.

And at one point, Larry Flint put out a porno magazine called Taboo. And the subscriber lists got mixed up. So a bunch of people who were expecting a porno mag got Big Brother. And the flip side of that was that a bunch of kids who were expecting a skate magazine got a porno mag, which upset a lot of parents. Yep, it's true true story and so they'd sort of earned a reputation even outside of the skate world but even within the skate world everyone was sort of like oh my god did you see what big brother ran i found a whole group of guys that i really liked and respected and were like high level functioning pieces of shit sparked so many like talented creative people like Jackass came out of that. Jackass before Jackass.

When you have Bam Marger, Johnny Knoxville, and Jeff Tremaine together, that's really when Jackass exploded, right? And so can you talk to me a little bit about why that unholy union was so transformative? You've got these kind of two gonzo alphas together, and they're sort of pushing each other. I would compare it to the Chicago Bulls when you had Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen. And you put these two guys together, and it just becomes this whole thing of one-upmanship. Who can do the crazier thing? And then when you add somebody like Steve-O.

Hi, I'm Steve-O, and I'm about to jump into some poo. You know, who is this kid from Florida. He was reading Big Brother. He was interested in making a name for himself. He tried to do this crazy, crazy stunt in which he was going to do a backflip while setting his hair on fire. It ended up almost burning half his face off. You've got these people who are really just deciding like, you think this is nuts? I'm going to go put chicken in my underwear

and then swing over a crocodile pit. Put the chicken on! Yeah! Yeah! Go, go, go! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move!

Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Don't move! Can we just talk for a second about how Spike Jones, like Oscar-winning director Spike Jones, has been a key part of the Jackass family since the start?

It always cracks me up when I hear someone like Oscar-nominated Spike Jones, comma, patron saint of Jackass. People seem, i think sometimes people forget that long before he was making award-winning music videos and movies and such he was just another skate punk kid who worked with big brother he was shooting videos for them he was shooting like underground skate videos he actually knew jeff tremaine from high school and when they first started shopping the idea around for a tv show for Jackass, Tremaine was like, oh, we should get my friend, you know, Spike. And this was right up Spike's alley.

So he was like, yeah, of course, let me help you try and like sell this and stuff. And the original idea for doing the Jackass show, they were going to take it to HBO. The story goes that everybody who saw it at HBO was like, oh my God, I think I'm going to get sick. We can't put this on the air. Are you kidding me? So they started kind of shopping it around. And then when they took it to MTV, they said they got the exact

opposite reaction, how everybody at MTV was cracking up and being like, oh, my God, this is perfect. And according to Knoxville, he'd said a couple of people from MTV sort of took him aside and whispered in his ear and they were like, see how far you can push this. Forget those snobs at HBO. Let them have their Sopranos and their Deadwoods and their Sex and the Cities. We want you to ride a bike off a ramp and just face plant. To us, that's entertainment. And sure enough, like people loved it. I mean, that first season, people just went nuts for it. And I thought a lot about why. And the only thing I can think of is that you can't fake this stuff. There's something so uncut and so primal about seeing

that kind of stuff that people just responded to it. It became the crazy thing that you watched on TV in the early 2000s. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because

money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. While some people, of course, were saying that it was basically like the end of civilization, others were saying, no, like this is art, right? And can you help us chart that? Like, how did it go from being this kind of like punk, nihilistic, lowbrow phenomenon to debating whether or not it's art and how it fits into the culture. Yeah, you know, it's funny. Johnny Knoxville has been doing a bunch of interviews

around the release of, you know, Jackass Forever. And, you know, his idea that the critics have finally gotten on board because they grew up watching Jackass. And, you know, now that they're the critics, there's almost a nostalgia factor of being like, oh, this is the show I loved. And so now I'm the tastemaker and I get to decide that it's art. The fact of the matter is like, you know, they had a premiere at the MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In a weird way, I think it's going to sound super pretentious when you're talking about a show that usually revolves around people getting kicked in the nuts. But I feel like there's a situationist, almost kind of Dadaist verve that they bring to these things that they do that the art world recognizes. People have to remember that the modern art world, like somebody like Marcel

Duchamp took a urinal and called it art, and it was considered art. And in a lot of ways, jackass is very artless. And yet there's something so wonderful and funny and primal about the way that they're kind of pushing the envelope entirely, that it does come off as this weird, subversive, you know, situationist art. I mean, what's more situationist than like, than pranking people in public, than dressing up as pandas and running down the street in Tokyo? I mean, to me, that's on. But there were also people who felt like it shouldn't be on the air, right? They took like a real moral umbrage to it. Parents and pundits and the powers that be were not fans of Jackass. And usually for one specific reason, and it's the

reason that there's a disclaimer that runs in front of every episode and all of the movies. And you know, that's basically kids don't try this at home. It basically kicked off this entire sort of copycat epidemic of kids trying to do these stunts at home. So you know, it got to the point where they were like, why are all these kids showing up with broken arms? Why are all these kids showing up, you know, with concussions? And why does this word jackass keep coming up all the time in these ERs? And, you know, people wanted to shut that thing down as soon as possible. When you're making a lot of money and you have the kind of ratings that jackass has, however, it's a little bit tough to do. Plus, you've got the backing of a corporation behind it who has to say, look, we do not condone

any of these things. And then they look at the ratings and they're like, yeah, we'd like another 16 episodes, please. I want to ask you about this period in Jackass history, when it kind of started to unravel. After just three seasons on MTV, Johnny Knoxville abruptly quits. And what was his justification for that? Well, the story is sort of varied depending on who you talk to. But from what I've heard, there was a bit that they were going to shoot called the Vomelette. I'm Chef Dave, and this is the omelette. I want everyone not in the hazmat suit back against the wall so Dave can make an omelette. And essentially, it was one of the Jackass performers, I think it was Dave England, was going to eat an entire omelet, this like stacked full of ingredients omelet.

Let's start out with, how about the onion? Those are always good to start the day with. There's three different colors for variety. You want a rainbow inside of you when it comes time to eat. Next up, we're going to need some butter in there. Lubricates the whole meal. Then throw it up

into a frying pan. Cooking is such a pleasure. Recook it, and then Steve-O, a man who never met something involving vomit he didn't love immediately was was going to eat it that's what i call a good size omelet yes coming along

nicely johnny can you smell that at all through that and you know mtv had already had some issues with them in terms of you know the copycats and you know kids ending up in the hospital and that kind of thing and and they were like, no, you can't do this. You need to show that this vomit omelet was cooked to a certain degree. Apparently, they were like, no, you could get really sick. There's pathogens in there. I think Knoxville had already been kind of tiring of the grind of doing the show. And so he was quoted as saying like, Hey, I'm not, I'm not going to do a watered down version of Jackass. Then it's not Jackass. This is just ridiculous. And essentially he was sort of like, you know, I'm done with this. You know, at that

point, like you can't, I guess you could do Jackass without Johnny Knoxville, but it, you know, it's like, I guess you could have had the Beatles without John Lennon. It's just not the same thing. It was at that point that they were like, well, maybe if we don't do the TV show, we could turn this into a movie. We wouldn't have to worry about MTV saying that we've got to keep things clean and nice and sanitary. We can push this even further. The following stunts were performed by professionals. So for your safety and the protection of those around you, Paramount Pictures and MTV Films insist that neither you nor your dumb little buddies attempt any of what you're about to see. Jackass, the movie. This isn't going to work. It might.

The other thing I wanted to talk to you about was the death of Ryan Dunn, who died in a car accident in 2011. Can you tell me about that loss? Police say Dunn's Porsche 911 hit the guardrail, launched into the woods before bursting into flames. I mean, it's a huge loss when you hear about these kind of things happening anyway, but it ties into something so much bigger. And it's not just that you can't just relegate to jackass. Essentially, you have to remember that these guys came out of skate culture and skate culture tends to attract a lot of misfits. That's one of the great things about it, actually. That's one of the great things about it, actually.

It gives a lot of people who don't feel like they fit into any, a lot of square pegs that can't fit in a round holes get attracted to skate culture because it's an outsider culture. And with that comes a lot of other things as well, like not just daring people to go do outrageous stunts and pranks, but maybe daring people to drink to excess, you know, maybe daring people to take drugs and take more drugs and to use party as a verb, you know, in a way that's not always healthy. And when you throw that together with suddenly being thrust into a spotlight that's absolutely glaring and you're famous and everybody wants to hang out with you and buy you drinks and give you drugs so they can say, hey, I got high with Steve-O. It becomes a little it becomes a little disorienting for everybody. And I think that really, it really kind of, it hits a low point when Ryan Dunn, who was one of the guys in the Jackass crew, ended up drinking to excess and then getting behind the wheel of a car

and dying in a car accident in 2011. I think he killed him and his passenger, who I believe was on the Jackass crew as well. Ty, I think that the reaction was one of kind of disbelief, because I think to look at what we've done on Jackass crew as well. Ty, I think that the reaction was one of kind of disbelief because I think to look at what we've done on Jackass kind of created a sort of false impression that we were, that we're invincible somehow. You know, we've gotten away with like so much life-threatening, crazy stuff. You just can't imagine us actually not surviving something.

And there had been a couple of wake-up calls before. I know that Steve always talked a lot about some problems with substance abuse, you know, throughout his life. When Jackass really started to become popular, he kind of went through the roof, and they had to stage an intervention with him at one point, and he had been to rehab. Somebody like Bam Margera, he's had some issues with mental health. When I got too, like, old to be able to keep being a professional skateboarder, skateboarding is what I love, so if I can't do that, what's the point? Why'd you want to meet me?

Because my family's in shambles. I disowned my mom for good. I never want to see her or talk to her. The reason that he's not in the new Jackass movie is because he had said that they were stealing some of his stunts and there were some accusations that maybe he wasn't in quite a great mind frame and I think they had to take out a restraining order and you know they're currently suing each other although Knoxville has you know spoken about how much he loves Bam and he hopes that he can be involved with future Jackass projects there's been a lot of there's been a lot of

pitfalls there's been a lot of darkness that's kind of hovered around these things and Ryan Dunn's death is really really where you kind of see like, there's a toll to living like this. But I also think that, you know, it's one of the reasons that I think people have really embraced this new film too, is the fact that like, guys are friends and the real kind of key to the what you would call the innocence of jackass which sounds weird to say but like

there is kind of like a wholesomeness and innocence to jackass and that even in their 50s even when these guys should really know better they still get a total thrill out of like hanging out with each other and pushing each other to the limit there There's a scene in the new movie that I really love where Steve-O's walking out of a trailer and he looks older. You know, his hair is graying on the sides. And, you know, he's clearly a guy in his late 40s. And suddenly he just gets beamed in the head

with like a dodgeball. And the camera turns and you see Johnny Knoxville, whose hair is like shock, shock white now. He's in his silver fox phase. And they're just laughing at each other, just laughing. They're like falling into each other's arms and laughing. And you really do feel like these guys are friends. They're actual friends.

They've been through a lot together. And they can still really just enjoy each other's company while somebody happens to be pitching a softball 80 miles per hour aimed at somebody's groin about 20 feet away. And I can't help but think about, you know, maybe one of the reasons why the movie is resonating now is also because like people kind of yearn for that time again, maybe in the 2000s or when they were growing up with Jackass. I don't know. I'm thinking about the nostalgia of the Super Bowl halftime show that we all watched on Sunday, too. It feels like there's kind of parallels there, maybe.

Yeah, I mean, nostalgia runs in 20-year cycles. So at the end of the 70s, everybody was pining for the late 50s. You know, that's why you get Greece. In the 2000s, the early 2000s, everybody was kind of looking towards the 80s. And, you know, now we're kind of looking, we're looking towards the early 2000s. And Jackass is definitely, it's definitely part of that wave. I also think too, I mean, getting back to the kind of friendship part, a lot of us for the last few years, as this pandemic has kind of ebbed and flowed, the tides have receded and then come back in. We haven't really got to hang out with our friends a lot, not in person. Yeah, like forget lobbing a ball at their head or... Forget launching your friend out of an easy chair that has a rocket underneath it.

Like we like just haven't even seen them. Yeah. Yeah, we just don't, you know, there's a certain kind of camaraderie that you see on that screen. It kind of like, you know, a really wonderful sense of like hanging out. These people hanging out together and having fun. And you do get a secondhand high, I think when you watch this new movie of like,

oh yeah, this is, it's the gang's back together. They're older, they're not much wiser, but they're all hanging out together and they all seem to still love doing this. So before we go, I have to ask you, favorite jackass stunt of all time? Oh my goodness. You know, the ones that really still make me laugh and the ones that really stick to my head, like, you know, you can't beat the wasabi up the nose. So today I'm going to treat myself to some wasabi snooters. You can't beat somebody pretending to read a love letter from a fan and then suddenly a huge boxing glove comes out like it was some Roadrunner cartoon

and punches the guy in the face. Hi, Jackass guys, I heard you were staying at this hotel. My name is Stephanie and me and my friends love you. Some of you actually hooked up with my sister four years ago. I don't care about that. Oh, you fucking dick. There's a scene in the new movie where,

I don't wanna spoil it too much for anybody who hasn't seen it, but it's the Silence of the Lambs sequence. And they call it that because they essentially shut off the lights and they film it in night vision the way that the climax of Silence of the Lambs is filmed. And they've convinced a bunch of the jackass crew that there's a venomous snake that's loose in this basement room that they're in. What gets me, what I think is absolutely just brilliant is that they've got this new guy, Zach Hoffman. He's basically this young guy who kind of grew up with Jackass. And essentially someone's saying like, there's a door over there.

There's a door. They have to go through that door. And when he goes through the door, when he goes to the door, it's pitch black. He gets hit on the head with a bunch of these iron skillets that are just hanging right in the door frame they've greased the patch of floor that's right past that so he starts slipping and falling and he comes across this large folding table that is filled with sharp tacks and mouse traps and he essentially throws himself over this table to try and get away from what he thinks is a

venomous snake as mouse traps are like going off all over his naked chest and he's got tacks in him and stuff and he's just yelling and screaming the way that they escalate that is like something out of a silent comedy or a Marx Brothers movie it is absolutely genius and it's one of those sequences where I look and I go I I don't, I don't care whether anybody thinks this is art or not. This is brilliant. And this is so incredibly funny. Well, David, that was literally one of the most entertaining spoilers anyone has ever delivered. So thank you so much for this. David Feer, thank you. Thank you.

This was a lot of fun. Oh, man. Thanks for having me. This was a blast. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening.

We'll talk to you tomorrow.