(upbeat rock music)
- I'm Michael Burns, welcome to Wisecrack.
(upbeat rock music)
Today I wanna talk about the TV and film franchise
that kept emergency rooms full
of suburban millennial teens
for much of the early 2000s.
No, not Scrubs, though many teens did go
to their local hospitals hoping to witness
twee antics and psychotic janitors
only to leave sorely disappointed.
We are of course, talking about Jackass.
- Oh, he's in my ear, get him out of my ear!
- The TV show turned film franchise
that saw a bunch of dudes ask life's big questions.
Like what if an almost naked adult man crawled
across the floor covered a mouse trap?
(upbeat music) - ooh
- How severely can you destroy a rental car
without consequences?
And which of your friends has the best sperm?
- Ric got good sperm.
- Okay, So the show is not known for its explicitly
philosophical themes, but we wanted to see
if we could discover some deep themes beneath
the reckless surface.
So we decided to give it the full, deeper, dumb treatment
which is to say, we're going to see if we can present
some interpretations of the show that will convince you.
And to be honest us, that Jackass is in fact deep.
So let's get into this wisecrack edition on Jackass.
Deep or dumb and stick around until the end of the video
cause I'm gonna be doing a quick Q and A session
with questions submitted by our patreons.
But now let's get into the video,
for those of you who weren't religiously watching MTV
in the early 2000s a quick refresher.
Jackass started as a short lived show, where a crew
of dudes led by Johnny Knoxville, performed all types
of dangerous, disgusting, and absurd stunts,
filmed in a super low fine manner.
The show ended when MTV wouldn't let them put their
best ideas on air.
So the team took their talents
to your local cinema and released a series of films.
"Jackass the movie"
- Hi, I'm Johnny Knoxville welcome to "Jackass"
- [Michael] "Jackass Number two"
- Hi, I'm Johnny Knoxville welcome to "Jackass," oooh
- [Michael] And "Jackass 3D."
- Hi I'm Johnny Knoxville. Welcome to "Jackass"
- With a fourth film,
Supposedly coming out later this year.
During this run they tempted fate with bulls and alligators,
used shopping carts, wheelbarrows
and big wheels as off-road vehicles, terrorized
Bam Margera parents repeatedly
and spent way more time in porta-potties
than the entire Coachella going population put together.
(Screaming)
And sadly it's worth mentioning
that things have not been all fun
and games for the "Jackass" crew with multiple members
struggling with addiction and Ryan Dunn, tragically dying
in a car accident.
To help us in our unlikely journey to prove Jackasses depth.
We're gonna to sort the shows various antics
into three categories.
Body humor, which is anything involving poop,
farts, puke, pice, self-inflicted tasers,
pranks, throwing flour
on your sleeping friends faces,
slapping your friends with a giant hand,
trapping your friends in a limo full of bees.
So basically just torturing your friends
and public disruptions, skateboarding through Tokyo
in Panda costumes, stripping in an electronic store
hiding duct taped, a naked man in a trunk.
So let's get started and see if we can get real deep
in that Jackass.
Let's begin with body humor.
Now I know what you're thinking.
Surely you're not going to try to tell me
an intelligent, worldly,
and downright gorgeous wisecrack viewer,
that there is some hidden philosophical depth
to a grown man shoving a toy car up his ass.
Sort of watching someone eat a puke omelet
is really a commentary on the mass reproduction
of art and culture.
And it probably isn't.
But hear me out, think about how the human body
is represented in today's media.
Most of the time it's misleading, deceptive,
and makes me wanna to get straight to work on my eight pack.
There is a multimillion dollar industry creating apps
that allow us to alter our appearances on social media.
Influencers put tons of time and effort into staging
supposedly natural photos, and whether it's hair plugs
or cheek filters, almost no one gracing our screens
these days as living in a good old fashioned flawed
human body.
And of course this all is the effect of making us feel like
(blip)about ourselves for not having dewy skin chiseled abs
or a gorgeous mullet, but the Jackass boys pull
off stunts to highlight the pure gross animality
of the human form.
And in the process, they actually offer a much more honest
and relatable vision of what a normal human body is actually
like. Even if you'd never put your own corporeal form
onto an actual rocket full of explosives
being shot Into the sky.
(upbeat music)
And not Only do we see raw bodies doing gross things
but we also see the repercussions and implications
of these stunts.
For example, when Johnny has a mishap trying to
do a rollerskate jump over the LA river, we follow him
to the emergency room, and in later stunts,
we see him wearing a soft cast.
Showing the physical damage done.
Rather than glamorizing these types of stunts,
Jackass makes it clear that they are very dumb
and likely to cause injury because these are real people
with real bodies, except for Steve-O who clearly
has vibranium bones, because he should absolutely be dead.
You could compare this to a standard action film
where heroes jumped through glass windows, take a couple
of bullets to the leg, drive a car off a bridge
and they are still able to walk it off in time
to kiss their inappropriately aged lover,
who of course has perfect hair and makeup after
being held hostage by some vaguely Eastern European
bad guys.
But Jackass reminds us that our bodies don't work that Way.
(people laughing in the background)
- Now, at this point, you might be thinking
that with all the (blip) coming out of my mouth
that I must be doing some sort of
reverse Jackass style fecal stunts, but there
are actual scholars who think
there is something deep going on here too.
Berkeley professor Andrew Shanken argues
that "the myriad ways in which Jackass uses pain
corporal transgression and public humiliation suggest ties
to a more fluid sense of the body.
Allowing it uses as a vehicle for entertainment,
even via potentially harmful behavior, to see more
normative." Put simply, it's funny when people fall down
and the comedic simplicity of body-based humor
is something we should embrace and celebrate.
As Shanken goes on to say, "Jackass carries on
the physical humor of Charlie Chaplin
an aesthetic mode of decadence
and this might make it possible for Jackass stunts to
still be pretty funny a 100 years from now."
(crushing sounds) - Redemption is pain
- Much like how the physical comedy of chaplain
the three Stooges and the Marx brothers still holds up.
So this makes jackasses body humor, at least kind of deep,
but if we're honest, it's also kind of dumb.
I mean, watching a grown man pee on another grown man
and in 3D, nonetheless is pretty gross.
And some of the penis based gags tend to play
into the dated tropes about male sexuality and worse,
they can see kind of homophobic.
Also they let audience members at screenings
of the movies to throw up in their seats,
which is definitely not deep, but definitely is funny.
Let's step away from the flying port-a-potties
and desecrated display model toilets,
and talk about the very funny and sometimes brutal pranks
the guys pull on each other.
If our attempt to make body humor deep felt like a reach,
I think there might be a more convincing argument here
for why pranks are doing a lot more than just
ruining film or Jared's REM cycle, poor guy.
Well, the pranks are of course, very funny.
They also inject a sense of surprise and wonder
into otherwise mundane situations.
Many of the shows best pranks take place
in pretty boring places like the halls
of a bland production office, the back of a van, or simply
during downtime while on set.
And though they obviously have the budget for expensive
props and effects, the pranks often rely on things
most of us have around the house,
like a bag of flowers and super glue,
(screams)
Or a stun gun.
Okay. Probably not the stun gun.
The crews pranking is built
on a creative ability to turn generic situations
and objects into sites of possibility and surprise.
- Hi, I'm Michael Burns. Welcome to the Wisecrack.
(group chattering in the back ground)
- [narrator] What's more, the pranks
are almost always filmed in a way
that shows us the reactions of the cast and crew.
Who often hunched over in the type of
laughter that leaves you unable to form coherent sentences.
And I don't think it's going too far to say
that these pranks create moments of collective joy.
For both the prankers, the prankees and us, the prank,
the audience, more so than lots of comedic entertainment,
this leaves us feeling in on the joke.
And it's not just joy as we can feel real empathy
with both the performers being pranked,
as I too can imagine what it would be
like to have a small child kicked me
in the groin or with the other guy's laughing
on the side, as I too can imagine how funny it
would be to watch my friend get kicked
in the groin by a line of children.
(a group laughing)
And even if at times it feels like
they're singling someone out,
writer Benedict Carey has noted
that practical jokes are far more commonly
an effort to bring a person into a group,
Anthropologists have found.
An integral part of rituals around
the world intended to temper success with humility
and recent research suggests that the experience
of being duped can stir self-reflection in a way
few other experiences can.
Functioning as a check on arrogance obliviousness.
So I guess pranking our friends can lead
to self-reflection and dare I say self-examination
which I guess makes Jackass a fundamentally
philosophic enterprise.
Too far, yeah, but you might be thinking,
aren't there pranks sometimes kind of mean
and you wouldn't be wrong
as there are occasions where the person being pranked
isn't a part of the crew or in on the joke.
I have a pretty high tolerance
for the brutality of their pranks,
but even I felt pretty squirmy watching Bam Margera
reduced to tears under 2 occasions
he gets trapped in an enclosed space
with live snakes as a prank.
At this point, I imagine many
of you remain unconvinced that Jackass is in fact deep.
But our best chance of changing that is going to
be their stunts that involve acts of public disruption.
These are the parts of the show where various Jackasses
entered a shared public space to mix things up a bit.
These stunts usually take a space that's
either private or used for the purpose
of commerce and turn them into spaces of public performance.
Transforming a bland business park
or suburban mall and to a place of communal joy.
We see this whether the crew is ripping
down a public fountain in a kayak,
shredding down a ski slope, bare chested
in on a surf board or using shopping carts
for all types of extremely reckless behavior.
(rock music)
And for the lucky civilians who are privy
to these disruptions, such a moments can create feelings
of shock, wonder, joy, and surprise.
This is perhaps most evident
during the recurring stunt where Preston Lacy
not smaller gentlemen, chases Wee Men
a not large gentlemen through the street
while they're both in their underwear or in a related stunt,
when Preston walks into a grocery store or a port-a-potty
and comes out as Wee Man.
Multiple scholars have pointed out
that these social disruptions, often take place
in the types of suburban spaces that represent the dreams
of post-war American culture.
And it was that culture that produced the types
of boredom in suburban malaise that shaped youth culture
in the 80s and 90s.
The very era when our Jack boys became Jack man.
Okay, that felt weird to say.
For our buddy Shanken Jackass grew
out of the cultural geography of the post-war suburb.
It speaks of unmonitored spaces,
the cheap handheld video camera,
the liberalizing cultural revolution of the 1960s
and feminism in the 1970s, which sent women back to school
and work and their children into
unsupervised world of play.
And where there's unsupervised play,
there's bound to be danger.
Hi, I'm Michael Burns, Welcome to Wisecrack.
NO I can't do, I can't do, I can't do it
I'm going home, I'm going home.
Stop it, don't, stop doing it, stop filming.
So we have cheap consumer goods, empty suburban spaces
and a lack of strict supervision enabled by the safety
of America's sprawling zones of strip mall wonder.
This all created the perfect cultural conditions
for bored kids with skateboards to get a little reckless
and turn bland monuments of commerce and safety into sites
of danger and transgression, which is why it's no surprise
that Jackass emerged from skateboarding culture
and specifically the magazine big brother where
Johnny Knoxville got his start testing
stun guns and maces on himself.
And indeed much has been written about the way
skateboarding communities have reshaped the ecology
of urban and suburban landscapes, with some cities
even encouraging skateboarding to reactivate communities.
Basically when the Jackass gentlemen
wreak havoc in shopping malls
they infuse them with the type of creativity
and performativity that breaks whats their intended purpose.
(window shuttered)
(man groaning)
And these acts can be seen as critiques
of the bland monotony of suburban culture.
As Shanken notes just as the medieval gesture mocked
the high seriousness of the King
his floppy cap, the foil to the crown,
so Jackass poses as the self-conscious jester
for the courts of the suburb.
Yet they do so with such harmless,
good cheer that their terrible
honesty holds the court together.
Their public stunts also bring a visible excitement
and curiosity to the folks that lucky enough to be walking
by or eating lunch outside when they happen.
As sociologists Icer Paul Sani writes
while discussing the work
of fellow Jackass scholar Jory Lager Way,
these public stunts can galvanize into interaction
among strangers.
Because nothing helps strike
up conversations among strangers
like an elderly woman who is a man
in prosthetics showing up at an outdoor cafe naked.
This might be a leap on my behalf
but this type of social effect
isn't too distinct from a French Jackasses Jean-Paul Sartre
and Alon Bed Jew would call group subjects.
Formed out of novel and disruptive situations.
For these French bros something disruptive
or novel happening in a previously stagnant setting,
leads to sharing WTF glances with the strangers around us.
potentially bringing us
into new relation with those strangers.
Okay, I'll admit it'll really do buy this argument
and I think it's probably the best evidence
for the show being pretty deep.
There's also been some great academic writing
on this very topic.
So, did we exhaustively prove that Jackass is in fact
a deep cultural artifact
that future generations will use as a Rosetta stone to
understand the particular contradictions of suburban Malays
and the persistence of the male adolescent ego.
Yeah, probably not, and while the aspects
of the show that turned unknown civilians
into victims into a play on retrograde racial
and sexual tropes, definitely fall
into the category of dumb, the overall artistic merit
of the show qualifies is pretty deep, especially
for a group of performers that has a designated poop guy.
Jackass embraces the simplicity
of embodied performativity and finds joy
in turning generic spaces of commerce
and conformity into sites of bizarre stones and spectacles.
And we're not the only ones who think this
as the Museum of Modern Art in New York
held the screening of 3D as an official event.
And I would pay infinity dollars to have been in the room
as some stuffy art type saw all that puke and and 3D.
(laughing)
And maybe one of the best testaments
to Jackass's deepness is the continued legacy
of this type of body-based humor and performativity,
in folks from Sasha Baron Cohen to Eric Andre
and Natalie Palamides.
But what do you think? Is Jackass secretly brilliant?
Or am I just looking for an excuse to watch grown men roll
down a Hill inside giant tires and feel smart?
Let us know in the comments.
And before we go, we wanted to take a second
and answer some questions submitted
by our patreons on our discourse.
Something you can be a part of for as little as
five dollars a month. Just saying.
NotDavid asks, can you help me understand Locke's essay
concerning human understanding, even if just book two.
Okay. So basically qualities are things
that help us perceive and understand stuff in the world.
And substance is the raw stuff that helps us
experience things and get ideas in our minds.
But also you should read his inquiries
as they're much more clear.
Okay. GregPowell419 asks,
do you believe knowing and understanding philosophy
can lead people to become virtuous?
So some of the kindest people I've ever met,
haven't read a book since high school.
And some of the meanest have been distinguished philosophy
Professors. I think knowing stuff
doesn't make you a good person.
It's the desire to be virtuous mixed
with philosophical knowledge that gets the job done.
This is what the ancient Greeks were really good at,
that and drinking wine.
Okay. Finally, Snake Metro asks,
how can entertainment be vulgar
and gross out humor without it lowering the media?
Okay. Not to be that guy, but I think the video
you just watched hopefully helped answer this a little bit.
Also check out our video on Eric Andre.
But the main thing is if the vulgar
or gross thing is trying to get laughs
just because it's gross, it's usually lowering things.
But the previously mentioned Sasha Baron Cohen
and Natalie Palamides show us how gross and vulgar humor
can be used to make us think about some heavy shit.
Okay. That's it for now,
if you want to join in next time,
go to patreon.com/wisecrack and join in on the fun.
As always, thanks for watching. Later.
(upbeat music)