JACKASS: BEST AND LAST is the name of this year’s JACKASS motion picture event (currently leaving theaters), because it’s a reunion mixed with a “best of” compilation as a finale to the series. New sequences are mixed with highlights and previously unseen footage from more than a quarter century of Johnny Knoxville and pals doing stupid and dangerous shit for laughs.

As usual there is a lot of stuff where things are stuck up butts or shit comes out of butts. I am personally not a fan of those aspects of butts, but these guys are made different, and I can accept that. It’s funny that they can be accurately described as stunt men (they get fired on rockets, punched in the face, butted by an angry ram, launched on slingshots, electrocuted, etc.) but the most horrifying stuff is usually poop related. At long last there is an escape room where someone has to reach into a hole not knowing that they are also reaching into their colleague’s butthole.

The two most memorable new sequences are inspired by the original cast’s present status as men over 50. One has them playing Twister in transparent jumpsuits after downing colonoscopy prep. It doesn’t take long for one of them to spring a diarrhea leak and get everyone on set puking. The entertainment value is multi-layered: being too grossed out to keep my eyes on what the camera is pointed at, marveling at the ludicrousness of coming up and going through with an idea like this, and most of all enjoying the enthusiasm by the boys (or, in many cases, the amusement of the boys at one of their co-stars being very unenthused).

Another middle-aged-man stunt introduces the newest crew member, Larry – one of those fucking robots that we all enjoy seeing videos of malfunctioning and flopping around like a dead fish or randomly sucker punching some innocent audience member. (In the fictional world of THE ANIMATRIX it felt sadistic to watch robots bite it, but in the real world they will never be sentient so it’s more like that scene in OFFICE SPACE where they destroy the printer.) The comedian Adam Ray stands by providing a roboticized voice for Larry, exhibiting poor bedside manner as he prepares to give Steve-O the historic first robot-to-man prostate exam.

Maybe Larry’s not an official team member, though, because I don’t think he’s in the intro or the outro, those more cinematic and higher production value sequences that make the movies a little more special. The first one welcomes each of the stars strutting on Jamiroquai-video-style moving floors and being surprised with a paint bucket to the face, a mallet to the dick, or that sort of thing. The thrilling conclusion has them rolling in the iconic giant shopping cart as action movie mayhem happens all around them.

There are different personality types represented. Knoxville is the charismatic ringleader, you can see why they all follow him. The clip packages here include two of his all time great moments where he somehow remembers to say a very punchline after regaining consciousness from (respectively) a boxing knockout and a bull mauling.

Chris Pontius, with his long braid, sweet smile and penchant for nudity, seems like some kind of positivity guru. Steve-O shares his unlikely combination of unbridled wildness and seeming like a sweetheart. I personally find Danger Ehren and Poopies a little annoying and guiltily enjoy seeing them handle their torment with less grace than the others. But Poopies provides some of the biggest laughs in this since he willingly gets Mar-a-Lago style lip injections, so later in the movie something will be going on and they’ll cut to him watching and he looks like he’s having a deadly reaction to a bee sting.

Poopies was one of the new generation of cast members introduced in JACKASS FOREVER (2022), along with comedian Rachel Wolfson and Odd Future founding member Jasper Dolphin (plus his dad Dark Shark). They’re back but mostly as background laughers. The new recruit who seems most central here is Zach Holmes, a very large and interestingly shaped man who has a contagious enthusiasm (he’s a 34 year old who followed the Jackass career path, getting his start shooting a flare into his crotch on Youtube).

A typical Zach Holmes stunt involves him hoisted by cables and slowly lowered ass-first onto contestants as they answer trivia. For some reason Paul Walter Hauser (RICHARD JEWELL) is a guest in that scene, and I like how he makes a point of acknowledging Zach for his work.

All of this comes after an honestly disturbing prologue, an infamous unused video shot in 1998. Twenty-something Knoxville tests a bullet proof vest by wearing it and firing a handgun into his chest. With typical Knoxville humor, he slides a stack of Hustlers under the vest for extra protection. But unlike later stunts where his team have learned to laugh off the possibility of tragedy, someone behind the camera (Jeff Tremaine?) is vocally unhappy with the whole idea. As Knoxville clicks through empty chambers like Russian roulette there’s plenty of time for us to contemplate an alternate history where Knoxville is an obscure bit of trivia who died stupidly before any of this could happen. Before Jackass became an American institution.

I am only a casual Jackass viewer. I paid to see each of the movies, and these have been treasured theatrical experiences, especially when it was in 3D. The show I’ve enjoyed, but only in bits and pieces. The people I know with true love and knowledge of Jackass are all millennial women who watched it when they were young and know everybody’s names and histories way more than I ever will. But since the original Jackass crew are mostly men a few years older than me I think this farewell also has some cultural significance for us aging Gen-X dudes.

Think of all the of-their-time elements that came together to make this happen. Knoxville was working as an actor in commercials and trying to get freelance writing work when he pitched some magazines on a Hunter S. Thompson style article about testing self defense weapons on himself. Jeff Tremaine was a professional BMX rider and editor of the skate magazine Big Brother, but he asked him to do it as a segment for one of their home video releases. Producer Spike Jonze was one of Tremaine’s high school friends, and a photographer for Big Brother, while Pontius and the snowboarder Dave England were writers and featured clown/amateur stuntman Steve-O and skater Wee Man were featured in the videos. Danger Ehren was a skater and snowboarder who made his own stunt videos. Bam Margera (only appearing in archival footage here due to a falling out) and the late Ryan Dunn came from a completely separate series of skateboards ’n pranks videos that gained cult popularity and caught Tremaine’s eye.

So all of these weirdos came together in a window when so-called extreme sports were in a transition from punk rock type subcultures to part of the mainstream. There was enough money there for magazines with their own home video releases, but they weren’t too respectable to be published by Larry Flynt and to be doing genuinely dangerous things for attention. These various separate parties were part of the same culture that involved circulating home videos of pranks and reckless backyard stunts, but they were on it early enough that they could convince a major cable network to make a show out of it. By now it has been many years since there was any cable network with the cultural footprint that MTV had, and if there was one of course there is no fucking way they would get anywhere near anything like this. I would say it was unlikely at the time, but actually Saturday Night Live, Comedy Central and FX all made bids for it.

The massive success and surprisingly low collateral damage of the series led to many years of spin-offs and offshoots and wannabes. My young friends watched them all, others mimicked them on Youtube with enough success to be recruited for the fourth and fifth movies. I’m never gonna dive into all of that but I appreciate that somehow in their extraordinary levels of juvenilia the Jackass crew have glorified a relatively non-toxic version of masculinity. So much of their humor and behavior reminds me of dudes I knew in middle school (when I was a low-achieving skater), except some of those guys were real dicks and all of them who lived went on to normal jobs and families and shit. Margera-Knoxville beef aside, these are a group of friends who have navigated fame, addiction, tragedy and aging together and still have a bond, still make each other giggle like crazy, still love each other and/or what they somehow get to do together. I would not want to be locked in a dark room with a wild animal, to name one of hundreds of things in these movies I want absolutely no part in, but I do wish I still had friends I could go out and have fun with like that. It’s aspirational.

This time I also thought about a radical lack of self-consciousness, despite the exhibitionism of doing this all for cameras. What could possibly be more vulnerable than to be on a movie screen naked and unable to stop yourself from shitting? Or naked cupping a hand over your dick, or crying in pain saying guys it’s not funny anymore, and knowing that will be in the movie and it will be funny. I imagine there is a level of freedom to smashing through that kind of taboo. After that is there any reason to be embarrassed over anything else? So I suppose it’s not surprising that they also swagger right through all the modern obsessions with body standards. There are a few different styles of obesity, there are skinny guys, there are muscle guys but none of them seeming to be sculpted by the modern science. And they seem perfectly comfortable together shirtless, showing off their tattoos, many of them intentionally ugly, all of them (I’m pretty sure) smelling absolutely monstrous.

So, I don’t know, you stare into the abyss-hole of these stupid movies hard enough, you tend to catch a glimpse of something kinda profound. Using so much archival footage obviously makes this one feel a little less vital than the others (especially when there are long scenes from the one that only came out three years ago). But I think it might’ve been the best idea for the finale because it has this effect of ping ponging us through time, seeing these people at different ages like it’s BOYHOOD, especially in the nostalgic montages. It’s funny how in retrospect the young versions of every one of these guys looks really handsome.

Of course, Knoxville – always the actor, ever the frontman – has aged into a fifty-something look many of us would kill for. He looks great with silver hair and glasses, wearing his custom Jackass logo cardigans and polos with red Chuck Taylors and a Waylon Jennings belt buckle, as if one of the grey hairs in Flea’s mohawk became human.

For many reasons and in many ways, including good ones, you or I will never be true Jackasses. But may we all try to carry on their spirit of of joyful rule-breaking, of fearlessness, of being comfortable in our bodies and in revealing our true selves. May we also receive fewer injuries and limit our exposure to pain and bodily fluids to the extent we prefer. Hi, I’m Vern, goodbye to Jackass.