The most brutal part of this fight is that Johnny Knoxville clearly wanted to stop, but Butterbean goaded him to get up so he could score a knockout. Butterbean was successful, and Knoxville crashed into the floor.
His injuries in total included a concussion and stitches in his head. Butterbean, in return, got a small shot to the chin from Knoxville, which he only got because he encouraged the host to throw a punch back.
Margera had a litany of stunts he performed throughout Jackass and the successive movies, though not all of them always made the cut. Perhaps one of the most brutal injuries he sustained, though, came from a boxcar race in the television series, which was a bumpy ride, to put it mildly. Margera took a pretty hard fall during the stunt, and was subsequently rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with a broken tailbone. Bam Margera explained that due to the location of the x-ray, the outline of his penis was visible in the photos.
Margera said that MTV typically abstained from showing any form of nudity on Jackass , but for some reason, that was cleared for broadcast. Some folks will even tie a string to a tooth and attach the other end to a doorknob, and then slam the door to pull the tooth out. Being someone who knows very little about science, I would assume the logic makes sense that the car would pull the tooth better, but this stunt went disastrously wrong.
The late Ryan Dunn was part of the cast of Jackass Number Two and had one of the most dangerous injuries of all the Jackass crew. Reilly, seated next to us on the patio. Reilly was dressed in a powder blue three-piece suit and boots.
His big hat sat beside him. After the two had exchanged pleasantries and caught up a bit, Knoxville told me that he had gotten to know Reilly in the '90s, through Knoxville's then neighbor Heather Graham.
Thinking back to those days seemed to animate him. He had come to Los Angeles from Tennessee after high school with little more than the firm sense that he ought to be famous. Freshly arrived, he fell in with a community of striving young actors, all gunning for first successes, still unsure of what those successes would look like or lead to.
One was Bikini; another was Big Brother, an infamously anarchic skateboarding mag. He dropped his given name, P. Clapp, and adopted a pen name: Johnny Knoxville.
I can do this and feel satisfied and engaged. But it was the writing work that switched him on and allowed him to provide for his newborn daughter. It would also, in its own way, get him on television. He pitched the editors of Big Brother on conducting an experiment—testing the efficacy of pepper spray, a stun gun, a Taser, and a bulletproof vest by using them on himself.
The vest test required him to shoot himself with a pistol. Jeff Tremaine, the editor, assigned the story and suggested he also videotape his efforts. Knoxville survived and the magazine released a few videos that included his stunts.
The tapes made their way around Hollywood, and Knoxville, Tremaine, and their director friend Spike Jonze showed a version to MTV, where executives said they wanted to build a show around this sort of thing. Jonze was stunned. What followed, Knoxville still can't quite believe. It just happened in an instant. Jackass premiered in , a dick-shaped lightning bolt arcing across the firmament of cable TV. I was 11 at the time.
I cannot describe how powerfully it reordered my sense of what was funny; nor can I express how rapidly it permeated the fundamental grammar of my friendships. The first stunt that captured my attention, I told Knoxville, was a relatively simple one: Nutball, where participants strip down to their underwear, sit with their legs splayed, and take turns lobbing a racquetball at each other's crotches. If you flinched, you lost.
If you didn't flinch, you won—but also, you lost. In so many ways, Jackass was nothing more than that: the kind of shit boys do to make each other laugh, stretched into 22 minutes.
It was a demolition derby starring human Looney Tunes. Knoxville, naturally, was Bugs Bunny, the stick of dynamite not quite hidden behind his back. His costars were a rowdy band of fuckups: skaters and stunt performers and one enormous guy and one Wee Man and, in Steve-O, one Ringling Bros.
They appeared to genuinely love one another—but to only be able to show that love through increasingly baroque forms of torture. What they assembled was possibly the most efficient show in the history of television: Bits were rarely more than a minute or two long, and some of the strongest topped out at 15 seconds.
It was wall-to-wall mayhem. It was easy at the time to describe Jackass as lowest-common-denominator entertainment, a feeble nadir in TV's race to the bottom. With time, though, it became clear that the show was operating at the intersection of a number of ancient American traditions.
If you squinted, you could see traces of Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges. Knoxville's outlaw influences were present too. Spike Jonze told me that he and Tremaine and Knoxville hadn't discussed how the stunts might be introduced on the show, so Knoxville improvised what would become a signature opening to each segment.
I was like, damn…no wonder it's so iconic. At the center of it all, of course, was Knoxville, handsome and chatty and willing to both suffer and inflict enormous indignities. Steve-O philosophized that Knoxville's magnetism was rooted in his clumsiness. Knoxville doesn't have any of that, so when Knoxville falls down, it's like, it's devastating.
Later, while conducting a Zoom call from his office chair, he'd pull his left leg behind his head to demonstrate. But Knoxville brought something else to the show, Steve-O said—a kind of unimpeachable courage.
It's so counterintuitive. It's just so fucking backwards, you know? That the star happened to be even better at taking the abuse than his psycho castmates basically guaranteed the show's success. It would have been hard for it not to make television history. Immediately Jackass became a cultural lightning rod.
Senator Joe Lieberman called for MTV to change or cancel the show, citing a spate of teenagers who suffered injuries after copying notable stunts. According to Tremaine, the network responded. Frustrated, Knoxville quit less than a year after the first season had aired. They'd managed to film only 24 episodes and a special, but MTV recycled the material endlessly. Despite its brevity, the show was able to graze, or even predict, a number of emerging cultural trends.
It helped hasten MTV's shift to reality-based content. Hollywood began to throw money at films— Old School , Step Brothers , The Hangover —about stunted, self-thwarting men. Platforms like YouTube, Vine, and TikTok, which would build billion-dollar businesses atop clips of people doing stupid things, were years away.
But perhaps the most interesting thing Jackass revealed was that the very nature of fame was shifting in early-aughts America. When Kim Kardashian was barely out of high school, men like Knoxville and Steve-O and Bam Margera and Chris Pontius were proving that you could become famous by doing whatever it took to hold an audience's attention.
Steve-O and Pontius got their own show, Wildboyz, a nature-inflected take on Jackass. Margera got one too, focusing on his attempts to terrorize his suburban-Pennsylvania friends.
All had come by their fame honestly—by taking as much abuse as they could stomach and hoping people liked it. And people really, really liked it. To get it done, Knoxville says, they insured it stunt by stunt. What a ridiculous feeling. The series showcased wild stunts in a world before iPhones, social media and YouTube, airing for two years and eventually morphing into nine films and four spin-offs.
So when we got connected with them, we went out [to California] to film a couple of things with a few guys with the Big Brother skateboarding magazine. Tremaine became the director and they found themselves going full speed ahead. It just seemed to keep getting bigger and bigger. Those things are what people remember and it makes people laugh and that was the whole point of it.
You only get one body. Take care of it. I broke my ankle. I need this. I got paranoid about friends … and I got darker into drugs and drinking and wanting to be alone. In January, the skateboarder was arrested for DUI. He is currently undergoing treatment at an LA-based rehab facility. I check in, of course. I care for him. Many families are going through it — not knowing what to do, when to help. It ends badly sometimes. Ryan Dunn, a fixture on the show, was killed in when he crashed his Porsche in a drunken-driving accident.
Dunn had been drinking at a local bar hours before the accident, and his blood-alcohol content was later determined to be 0. His passenger, Zachary Hartwell, also was killed.
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