Not Such a Dumb Stunt After All

Somehow, “Jackass” is what television has come to: hand-held video of young men dousing themselves with sewage. And spraying one another with pepper spray. And roller-skating in jockstraps.

It’s no surprise that someone would find such things entertaining. Just how many someones is another matter. This unapologetic celebration of all things gross and juvenile is the top-rated show on MTV, and last fall was among the most popular shows on cable. As Matthew T. Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs put it: “The marriage between crass comedy and reality TV has been consummated. And the love child is ‘Jackass.’ ”

The leading beneficiary of this union seems to be Johnny Knoxville, co-creator, executive producer and host of “Jackass.” With understated style and deadpan one-liners, he leads a band of merry men in antics that make mothers everywhere cringe. They jump off rooftops, joust in horse manure, eat eggs until they barf.

Like all symbols of teenage rebellion, “Jackass” even got an official rebuke. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) called to have it yanked off the air in January when a 13-year-old severely burned himself trying to imitate a human barbecue stunt.

The condemnation didn’t hurt the show. As any class clown knows, any attention is good attention. And so far, the attention launched Knoxville’s budding movie career.

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Knoxville first made a name for himself the old-fashioned way. By getting shot.

Since then he’s been overturned inside a Porta Potti, knocked out by a boxer, and the subject of a very thorough athletic cup test--with each indignity nationally televised.

“Host” is a loose term as applied to “Jackass,” which has the structure of video shot by your neighbor’s teenage son. His job seems to be taking on the stunts that involve real pain and occasionally saying a few words before the chaos begins. Executive producer and co-creator Jeff Tremaine put it this way: “I thought he was the only one who could really complete a sentence on camera, so he had to be the host.”

But that understates Knoxville’s charm, which emerges through some shaky camera work and gag-reflex-inducing stunts. Even covered in feces, he’s raffishly appealing. He never looks to have shaved recently. His hair is combed back and yet sticks out like a little boy’s. He favors shirts that remain unbuttoned at the cuffs, making them seem a bit too small for his 6-foot-1 frame. And yet, there’s no denying that he’s handsome, softening brooding looks with an unexpected grin.

Despite his matinee-idol looks, Knoxville--whose real name is P.J. Clapp--was living in Los Angeles with no attention from Hollywood for almost a decade. He’d come here the summer after high school graduation for a six-week program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He lasted only three.

He liked L.A., though--it offered more opportunities than south Knoxville, Tenn., anyway--and he moved here permanently the next year. He waited tables, tended bar, moved furniture, umpired Little League. Eventually he met the girl in the apartment building next door--Melanie, a fashion designer--and married her.

“I didn’t really do anything about acting,” said Knoxville, who turned 30 last week. “Nothing really happened in my time out here except Melanie got pregnant and we decided to get married. I kind of reassessed everything and decided I should probably do something with my time because I had a child on the way.”

Knoxville’s idea of responsible parenthood would make for an interesting remake of “Father Knows Best.” First, he started a yet-to-be-finished novel. Then he began writing for underground magazines, mostly essays about whatever insane adventure an editor dreamed up or agreed to. He spent the night in a field with 10,000 hippies for the Rainbow Gathering. He was supposed to hitchhike to Dallas but wrote the whole article from his back porch. He crafted a nom de plume--Johnny Knoxville--from his middle name and his Tennessee hometown. It had a rock ‘n’ roll edge, like Johnny Ramone, Johnny Rotten. At least it sounded cooler than P.J. Clapp.

The idea that would change his life was this: He would test out various pieces of self-defense equipment on himself and write about it--like Consumer Reports if it were written by Hunter S. Thompson. He would be doused with pepper spray, shocked with a stun gun and zapped by a Taser gun. For the finale, he would be shot with a .38-caliber pistol while wearing a bulletproof vest. (A cheap one too. “I didn’t have much money at the time,” Knoxville said. “Afterward I was like, that probably wasn’t very smart.”)

No editor would touch this piece. Except Jeff Tremaine, who was then an editor at the skateboarding culture magazine Big Brother.

“It is a skateboarding magazine but surrounded with a lot of nonsense,” Tremaine explained. “We focus a lot on the lifestyle of skateboarders and what they’re into. We ended up doing a lot of pranks and silliness that we would film, and that would wind up in the videos.”

So Tremaine suggested that Knoxville not only write the self-defense article, but also film the research process. Knoxville, not surprisingly, was game. The cameraman was not. He wouldn’t even get in the car. He handed Knoxville the camera and said “The tape’s in it. Just hit play.”

Knoxville filmed the first three segments in the backyard of close friend “Beautiful” Jason Fijil. And then, out in the Angeles National Forest, he stuffed under his bulletproof vest two copies of Hustler and two of Leg World that he picked up from the “porn locker” at the Big Brother office. (Big Brother and the other magazines are all owned by Larry Flynt.) But his friend wouldn’t pull the trigger; he’d only hold the camera.

“I’m getting ready to do it, and Jason’s camera goes bzzzzz . . . and he’s totally off-frame focusing on a rock. If the bullet had gone off at that time, I would have been so angry. But eventually we pulled it off,” Knoxville said. “That’s the way it always is.”

This and other stunts and pranks wound up on two of Big Brother’s videos, each of which sold about 12,000 copies. One in particular--titled “Number Two”--made the rounds in Hollywood not unlike the short animated video that spawned “South Park.” Among the places it ended up: MTV, well-known for pushing the boundaries of good taste with series such as “Beavis and Butt-head” and “The Tom Green Show.”

“We said, ‘Get that guy now,’ ” remembered Brian Graden, president of programming at MTV. But no one knew where to find him. Months passed before the network would begin developing “Jackass” with Knoxville, Tremaine and Tremaine’s friend from high school, director Spike Jonze, who is also an executive producer. When Graden finally did meet with the trio at Creative Artists Agency, he agreed to buy the show on the spot.

“I get pitches no less than 30 times a year that go generally like this: Wacky comedian goes out into the street and tries anything just to shock people. Right? And sometimes they have the tape of the wacky comedian with them,” Graden said. “I can give you one word to describe every one of those pitches: desperate.”

The video compilation of Big Brother footage was different. It was clear that these guys weren’t auditioning for TV. It was equally clear that one of them--Knoxville--was perfect for TV.

“The thing about star quality is its a wildly intangible thing, and you hope you know it when you see it,” Graden said. “The truth is you watch the tape and you’re drawn to him and you can’t put your finger on it.”

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“I’m Johnny Knoxville, and today I’m going to jump the L.A. River. On roller skates.”

Knoxville’s signature line--and resulting sprained ankle--pretty much sums up how he and “Jackass” leaped into American pop culture: without subtlety or fear.

Heavily promoted on MTV before its premiere, “Jackass” found a surprisingly large audience primed for this potent mix of the gross and the painful. Within weeks, the show was drawing 3.9 million viewers for each new episode on Sundays at 9 p.m. Since moving to 10 p.m. a few weeks ago, the ratings have dipped to 2.7 million from 3.2 million.

With each episode rerun up to 10 times, though, Graden estimates that 15 million to 20 million people eventually see it. By cable standards, it’s certainly a success. HBO’s “Sex and the City” averages 2.6 million viewers, for instance. A blockbuster like “The Sopranos” draws about 7.5 million. Broadcast hits like “ER” and “Survivor” are seen by 25 million or more.

Felling, the media director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., said it’s not completely unexpected that people--especially young people--would be drawn to “Jackass” or other staged, unscripted shows. TV viewers have become completely saturated by drama and comedy.

“We’re sick of the family having a problem for 22 minutes and then figuring it out, or waiting for somebody to be touched by an angel. We know all the scripts, and we’re sick to death of it,” he said.

Add to that the appeal for viewers of identifying with people on TV--not characters, but real people. And for teens, particularly, the notion of doing things that are not allowed--forbidden, even, by MTV’s own warnings on the show.

“It’s fresh and it’s new and it’s so different from the scripted, politically correct programming of the past,” he said. “This is the antithesis of the ‘Afterschool Special’ where everyone learns a lesson. ‘Jackass’ has made the leap from ‘When Animals Attack’ to ‘When People Attack Themselves.’ ”

It’s true that there was no telling what would happen next on “Jackass.” Some of the initial “Jackass” material came directly from the Big Brother videos, including the self-defense segment, minus the real gun. Other segments came from similar videos made by professional skateboarder Bam Margera, who is now a member of Team “Jackass.” They filled in the rest with pranks, like pretending to drive off with a baby carrier left on top of an SUV.

“It’s great,” Knoxville said. “It’s a real wonderful, sadistic feeling, and it gets your cockles up. . . . I don’t know. People love sports bloopers, car wrecks, train wrecks, car chases because you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the same reason you watch our show.”

It was all fun and games until someone--well, someone not on the show--got hurt. Jason Lind, a 13-year-old from Connecticut, was severely burned in January while trying to imitate a “Jackass” stunt. Suddenly the reality of cable TV and the rhetoric of Washington, D.C., collided. The incident gave “Jackass” instant national notoriety and made MTV a target of criticism from, most prominently, Lieberman, who publicly condemned the show. In a letter to the network, the senator said he wanted the show off the air. The Lind family lawyer said recently that it had not ruled out suing MTV or its parent company, Viacom.

Blaming media for bad behavior is a tradition with a very long history--back to Plato, according to Gwenyth Jackaway, an associate professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University in New York. In the 1950s, congressional hearings looked into the threat to the day’s youth posed by comic books. The media--whether it’s TV or comics or heavy metal music--often are scapegoated, she said, because that’s easier than wrestling with the more complex issues. “One of the things I find deeply troubling about putting the blame on media is that it absolves the real institutions in society--family, schools, churches--of their responsibility for helping raise young adults.”

Jackaway said her research shows that media outlets have never been found culpable for provoking behavior, so MTV is almost certain not to be found legally liable. “We [social scientists] have tons of evidence that it’s not a simple monkey-see, monkey-do phenomenon. Most people who watch ‘Jackass’ laugh and go on with their night.”

However, that doesn’t mean that the network--and society--shouldn’t think hard about the entertainment targeted at adolescent boys, said Felling. MTV teaches teenagers what music to listen to, what to think about it, what to wear, how to be cool. “It sets the agenda,” he said. “Whether they want that responsibility or not, they’re showing kids how to act.”

MTV made the warning that precedes the show more stern, and last month moved the show from 9 to 10 p.m. The network insists that the changes were not in response to Lieberman’s complaints.

In an interview before Lind’s accident, MTV’s Graden said it was important to realize that people were making “Jackass”-type videos long before the show came around. “And those skate videos are everywhere. They’re for sale at your video store. They’re all over the Internet. Anyone who’s into skating knows that stuff is out there. So it’s not like we went out and started hurting ourselves with things that are just ill-advised. This is culture. It is what is out there.”

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Within a day of Lieberman’s first statement, fans rallied around “Jackass” in Internet chat rooms, saying parents are responsible for monitoring what their kids are watching and how they behave. Some started petitions to Lieberman, including 23-year-old Jennifer Moore, of Fayetteville, N.C. She got 550 online signatures in three days. Her Knoxville fan site--something she just did for a class--gets 600 page views a day.

The people watching “Jackass” aren’t a bunch of savages, said Moore, a Web designer and college student. “It’s just funny to see. They do this crazy stuff that you would never do in real life. It’s fun to sit back and laugh at these people. They don’t say they’re perfect at it. They screw up--and that’s what’s funny about it.”

Moore said she’d never want to try any of those stunts. Heck, she doesn’t even want to be in the car when her boyfriend spins doughnuts. But she loves watching all sorts of stunts and thinks there ought to be a cable channel dedicated to extreme sports.

To tape episodes nine through 24, all 10 of the “Jackass” guys headed off to Florida for an extreme sport of their own: 10 days at Camp Pain, a playground designed (by a guy named Tim Payne) for arrested adolescence. Among the cast: Steve-O Glover, a genuine trained circus clown from Florida who tends to jump off things; Chris Pontius, a Big Brother writer who favors outfits that reveal his butt; and Jason “Wee Man” Acuna, a skateboarder whose nickname is an apt description of his stature.

Tremaine, for one, was exhausted when he got back--and he tried to stay behind the camera. They never slow down, he said. “You’ll lose one or two guys. They’ll have overdone it and need to fall out. But there’s always something going on. You get them together and they constantly just go nuts. You have to constantly look over your shoulder.”

“Jackass,” which is being broadcast in sets of eight episodes, is now in the middle of its second such season. The new episodes include footage from Camp Pain, along with Knoxville trying to return a punt against the USC football team, Knoxville playing professional rugby, Knoxville being thrown down stairs in a cardboard box. . . .

There was no traumatic childhood event that led Knoxville to this career of self-torture. He laughed at an article in which a psychiatrist analyzed “Jackass.” “She said I have issues and apparently I was abused as a child and all this. It couldn’t have been farther from the truth.” The truth: He had two sisters, 8 and 10 years his senior, which basically meant having three moms. “They really babied me, and all their friends would just coddle me. It was really, really nice.”

Knoxville was a sort of sickly kid, mostly because of severe asthma, which landed him in the hospital several times and plagues him still today. He played sports anyway and was--no surprise--sort of a class clown. His antics earned him his first dramatic role in the fourth grade: Farmer Brown in the school play. “I would finish my work before everyone else and terrorize the class. So the teacher was like, ‘OK, you get the lead in the school play with your spare time.’ . . . Nick, my best friend, played Spinach. His first line was, ‘You can eat me raw.’ We didn’t really know what that meant at the time, but we got a kick out of it.”

Knoxville’s penchant for joking around seems hereditary. His father, Phil Clapp, ran a tire store but made pranks his avocation. “He’s pretty much a professional liar,” Knoxville said. He’d pour cold water into his son’s shower. He sent fake letters from a VD clinic to his friends and his children’s friends. A recent hoax phone call--during which, using a voice-changing device, he accused someone of building a wall poorly--resulted in his facing a very angry brick mason holding a shotgun.

Knoxville picked up on those early lessons. “I was always on as a kid in public. I tried to curb that through the years because you can only take so much of those people,” he said.

Indeed, the Knoxville who talked about his family and career hardly seemed like his reckless persona on “Jackass.” His Tennessee-tinged speech was punctuated by the unexpectedly polite “ma’am.” He warmed visibly in talking about his wife of six years, and his 5-year-old daughter, Madison, whose name is tattooed in script above his heart. And unlike the brash, outrageous “Jackass,” this Knoxville was soft-spoken, even humble. When a waitress asked for an autograph, he apologized for his sloppy penmanship.

“I’ve definitely been very lucky, and I worked hard enough, you know? And I’m appreciative of what’s happened. . . . We’re, as a family, still adjusting to all the things that have come along with it. So it’s a good place to be, but we’re trying to make sense of it right now. It seems like I’m always going somewhere or coming from somewhere, and I don’t get to spend as much time with Melanie and Madison. But once we figured out it’s because of all this insanity that’s happening, we dealt with it.”

Part of what’s taking up his time is movie roles--four to date, starting with a small part in “Coyote Ugly.” This fall, he’ll be seen in three films, including “Deuces Wild,” a ‘50s gang drama; and “Life Without Dick,” in which he plays Sarah Jessica Parker’s boyfriend. Also due for a fall release is “Big Trouble,” which stars Tim Allen and Rene Russo, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld.

From the way Sonnenfeld described working with him, you’d never know Knoxville hadn’t acted since high school. Knoxville’s got great comic timing, Sonnenfeld said, because he doesn’t try to be funny. He’s perfect for a reaction shot because he’s always listening and paying attention in a scene. You’d never catch him just waiting for his next line, either.

“He’s just one of the most talented actors I’ve ever worked with,” said Sonnenfeld.

He was so impressed with Knoxville’s work on “Big Trouble” that he’s offered him a key part in “Men in Black 2,” set to film this summer. He’ll play both heads of a two-headed alien named Charlie and Scrad up against agents J and K (Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones).

Knoxville is also negotiating to star in “The Ringer,” a comedy produced by the Farrelly brothers about guys who try to rig the Special Olympics, and he’s attached as the lead to a comedy project called “Gringo,” which producer Tom Jacobson has set up at Universal.

“Johnny’s going to be really huge,” Sonnenfeld said. “And what’s really interesting for Johnny is what kind of career he decides to have. He can, in three years, be doing the kind of movies that Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey can do. I think he really has that kind of talent and charisma about him. Or he may decide he wants to do smaller roles or more character roles. But he can either carry a movie or be the guy that everyone remembers who wasn’t the lead.”

For now, he’s not giving up his other job, which he said is not acting. (“It’s all grossly real. Terribly real.”) He cuts back on his stunts only when movie work--because of insurance--demands.

“I don’t want to make my decisions for ‘Jackass’ based on my acting career. . . . I don’t want to be that guy who just completely jumps ship,” he said.

But no one knows how long “Jackass” can last. Graden quipped that he’d order 400 episodes if they’d make them. But outrageousness has a short shelf life, and Knoxville knows that too. “Once it becomes trite, we’ll hang it up and move on to something else.”

Then, deadpan, he added: “Maybe Broadway. ‘Jackass’ on Broadway. The Clash did it. Why not ‘Jackass’?”

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“Jackass” airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on MTV.