Abigoliah: Hello, everyone. This is All British Comedy Explained, the podcast where I, an American, finally learn about all the British comedy I’ve been missing out on. But today we’re going to flip the script, and for the first time ever we’re going to do All American Comedy Explained. With me to help explain this classic, classic American television show is Tom Watts, and the person we’ll be explaining it to is the usual explainer, Tom Salinsky.
Tom Salinsky: Yeah, you’ve brought backup British Tom. Which is rude, frankly.
Abigoliah: Well, it’ll become very clear why we needed him here for this moment.
Tom Watts: Nationality. Nationality.
Tom Salinsky: So we’ve been talking about doing an episode on I Love Lucy for quite a long time.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom Salinsky: But then you said you had something you wanted to do instead, or as well as.
Abigoliah: Yes. And you haven’t told me what it is.
Tom Salinsky: Well, what I decided to do was think of what you were selecting from. Okay, so here is the history of the American television sitcom in about two and a half minutes.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom Salinsky: All right. So obviously it begins in the 1950s. Jack Benny is a major early proponent. Burns and Allen. You’ve got things that are transferring from radio, like Amos ‘n’ Andy, which was a huge show. The Honeymooners, obviously, I Love Lucy. These all still look pretty primitive.
But in the 1960s the form starts to be codified, so you get slicker versions of kind of the same thing. You have The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and these more experimental shows like I Dream of Jeannie or The Munsters. You also get Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and The Monkees, which are really embracing the ’60s, and you get people like Carol Burnett and Diahann Carroll, and Julia, who are starting to bust out of the mould a bit.
Then in the ’70s it becomes much more about American society reflecting on itself. So you have shows like MASH*, my absolute favourite, obviously, Saturday Night Live, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sanford and Son, All in the Family — both those last two based on British shows.
Then in the ’80s it all starts to become family values again. The Cosby Show, Roseanne, The Golden Girls, and then a little bit of an undercurrent with things like The Simpsons and Murphy Brown, famously.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom Salinsky: Then the milk curdles in the ’90s and it becomes all very cynical. The Larry Sanders Show, Seinfeld, Frasier. It’s much more brittle, much more hard-edged. South Park really pushing the envelope.
Then in the 2000s we ditch the studio audience, and that means we just go hell for leather, joke-tastic. So it’s Parks and Recreation, it’s 30 Rock, it’s The Big Bang Theory — which does have a studio audience, but still has that same machine-gun gag rate.
There was a little reaction when I said Murphy Brown.
Abigoliah: Well, Murphy Brown is something we will cover at a later date.
Tom Watts: I think so.
Tom Salinsky: First of all, did I say the show that we’re going to be watching?
Abigoliah: Absolutely not. You couldn’t be more off.
Tom Salinsky: Oh. In that case, I have no clue.
Tom Watts: Well, I think there’s a bit of a clue.
Abigoliah: There is.
Tom Watts: You haven’t gone back far enough.
Tom Salinsky: No?
Tom Watts: Think about the original references.
Abigoliah: No, he hasn’t gone forward enough.
Tom Watts: No, back far enough.
Abigoliah: Okay, but the show itself is forwards. You can’t tell we’re a couple, by the way. I just want to say, for those of you watching on YouTube, we are recording this during the London heatwave.
Tom Salinsky: Oh my God.
Abigoliah: It is 94 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and that’s why we’re sweating like…
Tom Salinsky: If you see three different changes of tops over the course of this podcast recording, it’s because they were so drenched in sweat it would have been impolite to carry on recording without making a change.
Abigoliah: So I have a couple of hints for you that might help lead you there.
First hint: the first episode aired in 2000. It ran for three seasons, making 24 episodes and two specials, on MTV.
Tom Salinsky: On MTV? I’m not sure I’ve ever knowingly watched MTV.
Abigoliah: I had a feeling.
Tom Salinsky: Have I heard of this show?
Abigoliah: Okay. Another huge hint is I’m wearing their logo on my shirt right now. For those listening, I am wearing a shirt with a skull and crutches as the crossbones, and it says—
Tom Watts: “If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.”
Abigoliah: Yeah. That is their slogan and that is their logo.
Tom Salinsky: No clue what this is.
Abigoliah: Okay. One final hint. One of the stars of the sitcom was in a John Waters film in 2004 called A Dirty Shame that also starred British comedy legend Tracey Ullman.
Tom Salinsky: I’ve not seen that film.
Abigoliah: Okay. Should we tell him?
Tom Salinsky: I think you’re just going to have to tell me.
Tom Watts: I think you should do the introduction.
Abigoliah: Okay. I’m Abigoliah Schamaun, and welcome to Jackass.
Tom Salinsky: Oh my God. Okay. Yes, I have heard of Jackass. Jesus Christ.
Abigoliah: From Yes, Minister to Jackass.
Tom Salinsky: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Here’s the thing. I told a couple of our friends we were going to do this, and immediately everyone was like, “Oh, Salinsky’s going to hate it.” My Jackass prank on you is showing you Jackass.
The reason why I wanted to do this today and get it out as soon as possible is because Jackass has their fifth and final film coming out on June 26th: Jackass: The Final Ride. And also, something we’ll talk about a little later is that Nitro Circus, who are part of the Jackass universe, were just performing at the White House, jumping dirt bikes.
Tom Salinsky: I think I did see an Onion headline, something like: “In Jackass special, Johnny Knoxville attempts to walk upstairs without railings.”
Abigoliah: Yep. Yep. That’s my boy. That’s my boy.
Tom Salinsky: Yeah. He’s an actor as well, isn’t he? He was in Men in Black.
Tom Watts: Yeah.
Abigoliah: One of the later ones.
Tom Watts: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Well, that’s what he always wanted to do. He wanted to be an actor. Tell me first: what do you know about Jackass?
Tom Salinsky: Well, these shows… I’m immediately thinking about my lineage. To me it goes back to Candid Camera, which would have been the late ’50s, early ’60s, which was the first prank show on TV.
Then in this country, Tom might remember a show called Game for a Laugh in the ’80s, which morphed into Beadle’s About, Jeremy Beadle being this bearded, moustachioed prankster who would jump out at people and say, “Hey, it’s me!” Just like the smile, you’re on Candid Camera.
Then we had a series from Dom Joly, who would basically do comedy sketches, but shoot them with real people who didn’t know they were in a comedy sketch. So the point isn’t quite to prank them. He’s doing something which would be funny anyway. His stock in trade was being on a train or in a park with this gigantic mobile phone — this four-foot mobile phone — going, “I can’t talk, I’m on the phone now.” Like I said, that would be funny anyway, but it’s funnier when you have cutaways to people who have no idea they’re on TV, where presumably they have to run after them and get releases.
Tom Watts: What year was Trigger Happy TV?
Tom Salinsky: Oh, that would have been… I want to say the late ’90s. Again, I have not done research for this, so I am not responsible, internet, for any errors of fact I may make speaking off the cuff.
But yes, I think it was the late ’90s. So this is the next evolution of that, where it has kind of, I’m guessing, grown out of YouTube videos and people just doing dumb stuff for clicks.
Abigoliah: Actually, Jackass came before.
Tom Salinsky: Oh, okay.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So, just real quick, the reason why we have Tom Watts here is I came late to loving Jackass. When I was a young person and Jackass first came out, I was also a pretentious child who was like, “I’m into high comedy.” So I watched Frasier and read Neil Simon plays.
Tom Watts: Love you.
Abigoliah: Anyway. Yeah. And Tom’s the one who exposed me to Jackass. But you were in from the very beginning.
Tom Watts: Yeah. It’s interesting. I was really curious what your take on it would be because I suspected maybe you hadn’t watched it that much. And from the surface, it’s very easy to dismiss as really crass and stupid. And that’s because it’s really stupid.
Tom Salinsky: But that doesn’t necessarily mean it should be dismissed.
Tom Watts: But that’s why it’s fun. Yeah. And so what’s also really interesting—the point about YouTube—because it was… this is pre-influencer. The YouTube clips came after Jackass, and Jackass really evolved from skate culture.
Tom Salinsky: Oh.
Tom Watts: So there was the first wave of skaters who were doing their thing in California, and then the second wave, which is when I came through more, which was sort of Tony Hawk era, Eric Koston. There’s a whole bunch of them that were in the Tony Hawk games. You’re going to go into this anyway, are you?
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was more like…
Tom Watts: Yeah, it’s more just… it’s sort of…
Abigoliah: How did it make you feel?
Tom Watts: …an evolution from the skate culture. So we were already skaters living this lifestyle.
Tom Salinsky: You were?
Tom Watts: Yeah.
Tom Salinsky: Oh, okay.
Abigoliah: ♪ I was a skater boy… ♪ See, that’s why we were… in case you had skate questions, we brought a little Tech Deck so we can demonstrate stuff with our fingers.
Tom Watts: I feel like I’m probably a bit more rough around the edges than people expect. Yeah. Like, I grew up in Cornwall and we were all skaters. Skating is really stupid. Like, you are going to hurt yourself skating. So we were already in the culture. So when Jackass landed—and before that—it was already familiar to us because it’s kind of what we were already doing.
Abigoliah: Shall I get into it, gentlemen?
Tom Watts: Please do.
Abigoliah: All right. So, in the year 2000, the Millennium Dome opened here in London for a year-long exhibition. “Against All Odds” by Mariah Carey featuring Westlife was the number one song in the UK charts. Dinnerladies was crowned Best Comedy at the British Comedy Awards. In October of that year, America—and, dare I say, the world—was rocked by a rowdy bunch of skateboarders and fuck-ups with a little show called Jackass.
In part one of this series we will discuss how the show came to be, and we will talk about the crew that made it happen. In part two we will talk about the cultural significance of Jackass and how they have become the LGBT+ icons they are today, and how Jackass might be the answer to stopping the manosphere.
Tom Salinsky: Good God.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. Your mind needs to be more open than it ever has been.
Tom Salinsky: These are bold claims.
Abigoliah: Listen, you made me listen to The Goon Show. This is my comeback.
Tom Salinsky: So long ago.
Abigoliah: And I haven’t forgotten.
Tom Watts: I mean, it’s a bold statement, but I think it’s fully justifiable.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, we’ll get into it.
Now, for those of you who are listening right now on the main feed, just so you know, part one is going on the main feed. Part two will be on our Patreon, which is where we’re going to start putting these All American Comedy Explained episodes. Just as soon as I stop writing two-parters.
I just want to shout out a couple of resources that I used. One is the Nerd of Mouth podcast with Jake Young and Holden McNeely. They did an episode about Jackass back in 2022. And the other is an article by a writer named Nico Stratos called “Jackass Made Me the Trans Woman I Am.”
And Tom is here to provide colour and context as a former skater boy.
Tom Watts: A new job description: former skater boy.
Tom Salinsky: Get some business cards printed now.
Abigoliah: You used to be a cinematographer. Now you’re just skater boy.
Tom Watts: Just washed up.
Tom Salinsky: But “cinematographer” does bring own dolly.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom Salinsky: I mean, yeah.
Tom Watts: It’s a real thing. Skateboards make really good dollies.
Abigoliah: Fun fact. Again, those of you who are watching on YouTube might be like, “Wow, they’re sweating, but they’re incredibly well lit.” Tom insisted if he was going to be on the episode, he got to light it properly. So now we’re extra shiny. Look. Jesus God, I feel like I’m under interrogation.
Okay, let’s do this.
The comedy series turned movie franchise was produced by Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine, who was also the director, and Spike Jonze.
Tom Salinsky: Oh, rubbish.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah.
Tom Salinsky: Who—Spike Jonze?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom Salinsky: Film director, also music video director, known for… what did he do? Three Kings, I think, is his…
Abigoliah: And Being John Malkovich.
Tom Salinsky: Being John Malkovich. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. He’s a very interesting guy.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah.
Tom Watts: He also directed skate videos as well.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And he directed skate videos. So he and Jeff Tremaine, the director of Jackass, went to school together.
Tom Salinsky: He did that “Weapon of Choice” music video, I want to say.
Abigoliah: Probably.
Tom Salinsky: With Christopher Walken flying around.
Abigoliah: That’s him.
They went to school together—high school. Jeff’s a little older than Spike, but they knew each other through that. And Spike Jonze was a real big BMXer and skater back in the day. So he was running with all of these skateboarding crews a long time ago.
So Jackass is a prank show where a band of misfits perform stunts and pranks for the amusement of the audience and themselves. And I cannot stress how much this is just born out of these guys trying to make each other laugh.
To quote Holden McNeely from Nerd of Mouth: “Jackass is The Three Stooges taken to modern times.”
The main cast consists of two factions: the LA boys from Big Brother magazine, which I will explain, and the CKY lads from Pennsylvania. Don’t worry, I’ll also explain what that is.
They are Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Dave England, Ryan Dunn, Danger Ehren McGhehey, Jason “Wee Man” Acuña and Preston Lacy.
Tom Salinsky: If you’d given me a few minutes, I might have been able to dredge up Steve-O, Johnny Knoxville. Yeah. All the rest of them, it’s just like, “The who now?”
Abigoliah: Yeah. Hey, hey. It’s a whole world in itself.
Steve-O said of the show that:
“All Jackass really was for us was a grand battle for screen time. There was never any one guy having a preferred position of status. They would list us in a certain order, but beyond that the one determining factor was just great footage. It’s that simple. To the credit of Spike Jonze, Knoxville and Tremaine, there was never any ego. They never featured one guy more. The only criteria was the quality of footage.”
By quality, I mean: how gnarly is it?
Tom Salinsky: Yes. How wince-inducing.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, do you want to explain what “gnarly” is?
Tom Watts: That means… you know what?
Tom Salinsky: I heard the word bandied around. I think I did know that it came from skating or snowboarding.
Tom Watts: Yeah. It’s sort of fairly agnostic across extreme sports. But gnarly is… something becomes gnarly when it enters the realm of, “I am too scared to do that.”
Tom Salinsky: Right.
Tom Watts: So if you’re doing something that someone else is too scared to do, that’s a pretty good qualifier for whether it’s gnarly or not. And the goal is gnarly.
Tom Salinsky: Fear is a good survival mechanism, I want to say. So listen, because when we’re doing shows from the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, there always comes the point—usually in the second half—where I have to say, “This is how everybody died.” Yeah. Did anybody die making this show?
Abigoliah: That’s a really good question. No one has died making it. There will be a tragic death at one point, but it didn’t happen during the show.
I will say the injuries that have occurred during the show… because right now they’re out there doing press for Jackass: Best and Last. There’s a lot of interviews with them, and I saw Wee Man—who, by the way, is a little person, so that’s why they call him that. He doesn’t wee everywhere all the time. But they asked him how many injuries he had, and he goes, “I stopped counting after ten broken bones.”
Tom Salinsky: Yeah. I mean, Buster Keaton, the same. Well, yeah. And Keith Johnstone writes about seeing vaudeville clowns pointing at scars on their bodies and going, “That was a huge laugh. That was a minute and a half at the London Palladium.”
Abigoliah: Well, I was gonna do this a little later, but we’ll talk about it now since you brought it up.
One thing that Johnny always said when it came to doing these stunts is he likes the things that deal with gravity and blunt-force trauma. And his big inspirations are Buster Keaton, Evel Knievel and Looney Tunes, which you will see all of this referenced in Jackass. But he loves Buster Keaton. In fact, we’re going to see a clip later where he actually recreates a Buster Keaton stunt.
Tom Salinsky: I bet I can guess which one.
Abigoliah: Which one do you think it is?
Tom Salinsky: It’s the house falling.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. Should we tell him now? Should we tell him now? Let’s tell him now. Let’s tell him now. Okay, we’ll tell him later.
Tom Watts: The one you’re going to see is take two.
Tom Salinsky: Oh my God. Because when Buster Keaton did… Buster Keaton did it more than once. But the famous one, which is from… no, I can’t pull it, but I have it. You can see the whole film if you want, including that moment. The film ends with a great big hurricane, a great big storm, and the side of a house falls on him. And that was the only take. And also, at the time, Buster Keaton was said to be very depressed.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Oh. So it just was like, “Have a house fall on me.”
Tom Salinsky: Yeah. I think it was just like there was no safety. Basically what they did was—I assume Knoxville et al. did the same—they laid the wall down and he stood in the window, and they lined it up, making sure it wasn’t going to scrape his head. And he just had to make sure he didn’t move.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom Salinsky: If he leant forward, yeah, he could have been decapitated.
Abigoliah: Yeah. That’s pretty much what they told Knox.
Tom Watts: He was really mismanaged as well. I was watching an interview with Johnny Knoxville, who was talking about how much of a wasted talent Buster Keaton was.
Abigoliah: I think eventually, because it was back in the studio system, he signed with MGM, and I think they just didn’t use him properly or they just let him languish.
Tom Salinsky: He sunk all his money into making The General, which most people think is his masterpiece, but it did not make its money back. So he had no choice but to sign with MGM. And what’s particularly ironic is the first film he made for MGM—although he fought with the front office all the way, he basically got his own way on it—it’s called The Cameraman, and I think it’s fantastic. But it was after The Jazz Singer, so silent films were well on the way out.
And two things happened after the release of The Cameraman. One is that Buster Keaton never got his own way on a movie ever again. And the other is every time MGM signed a new comedy writer, performer or director, they would show them The Cameraman as, “This is how a really good comedy is made.”
Abigoliah: Really? Oh, that is such a fuck you.
Tom Salinsky: The Cameraman is amazing, though. I prefer it to The General.
Abigoliah: Oh, good to know.
Well, back to Jackass. In the mid-’90s, Johnny Knoxville moved from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actor. And as with most young aspiring actors, it wasn’t going well. He had done a handful of commercials. He had done some music videos, but he still had a job waiting tables. And he and his wife and his small daughter were basically living hand to mouth, and he knew he had to do something to get some income. And he was also a writer who was heavily influenced by the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.
Tom Salinsky: That also makes sense.
Abigoliah: And Johnny had an idea. He would test out various self-defence weapons on his own body and report how well they worked. He had planned to pepper-spray himself, use a stun gun, a Taser, and then shoot himself with a .38 calibre gun while wearing a bulletproof vest.
Tom Salinsky: I don’t know how well a bulletproof vest works at point-blank range.
Abigoliah: Well, he pitched the idea.
Tom Watts: There’s one really good way to find out.
Tom Salinsky: Should… should anyone be that curious?
Abigoliah: He pitched it to several magazines, and some of them point blank said no. Some of them were like, “Well, write it up first, and then maybe…” because no one wanted to take the responsibility and commission it.
Tom Salinsky: As well as Hunter S. Thompson, this is also reminding me of William S. Burroughs, who, just in case listeners don’t know, killed his wife when they were both on a trip because she said, “Time for our William Tell act,” and put an apple on her head.
Abigoliah: Like I said, no one really wanted to do it except Jeff Tremaine, who was then the editor of a skateboard magazine called Big Brother, who was like, “Yeah, let’s try it.”
And not only was Knoxville commissioned to write the article, but Tremaine suggested that he film the stunt too for their new video coming out called Number Two.
You have to understand that in the ’90s, skateboarding wasn’t just a sport. It was a culture. Before it was mainstream, loads of indie magazines catered to the market, and this was before YouTube. So skaters and skate magazines would also make VHS videos showing different tricks and stunts, and they’d be passed around from kid to kid. And that’s how skaters learned how to do different tricks.
Tom Watts: That’s very much the cultural point where I was in it because we were all skaters. This was before YouTube, so you couldn’t just go online and watch a skate video. And there wasn’t really any kind of readily available access to media.
So skate shops, where you bought your skateboards and your branded skate T-shirts and hoodies, would also sell skate videos. And each brand would have their own skate video.
Tom Salinsky: And these skate videos weren’t instructional. They were just spectacle.
Tom Watts: Spectacle.
Tom Salinsky: Right.
Tom Watts: So each brand had their own set of sponsored riders. Each skate video wanted to outdo the other person’s skate video. And between the group of friends, you’d have one or two skate videos each that were all different and you’d pass them around.
Before you could just go and watch something on YouTube, it was this physical VHS or DVD that you’d pass around. And again, it was sort of part of the mixtape, mix-CD culture where that came into it.
You’d watch a skate video before you went skating, or you’d watch them hundreds of times. They’d always be on. So when you watch… you’d watch a skate video before you go skating, which makes a lot of sense when it came to… if you watch Jackass before you go and do something stupid as well.
Tom Salinsky: Yeah.
Tom Watts: So the culture was primed for Jackass through skate videos. And part of skate videos as well was you watch the pro skaters do amazing things, and you can relate to a degree, but you’re not as good. And when they hurt themselves, you know how it feels because you’ve done something equally as stupid.
But at the end of every skate video there would be a collection called the slam section, because if you’re trying to skateboard down a railing—if you’re trying to grind down a railing of a set of, like, twenty steps—you’re probably not going to do that first time. You might do it the tenth time.
Tom Salinsky: They’d put some of the outtakes in.
Tom Watts: Yeah. So there’s a lot of footage of people falling over and hurting themselves, which became the slam section, and those became really popular.
Abigoliah: Again, it’s all about footage. Good footage. Today we call it content. Yeah. But even today, as I’ve been watching so many interviews with the Jackass lads, it’s still like, “It’s about good footage, man.”
Once Knoxville got the job, he used the commission money to buy the pepper spray, Taser and stun gun. And he said he bought the cheapest bulletproof vest he could find.
Tom Watts: No, no, no, no. My friend with the Christmas money his mum gave him…
Abigoliah: He’s like, at this point he’s in his twenties. He’s got a baby child. And he’s like, “I’ll just shoot myself in the chest.”
And Tremaine was worried about his safety, so he gave him a stack of porno magazines to put underneath the bulletproof vest to provide more protection.
And they filmed the stunt. It worked. The first part of it is in the first episode of Jackass, of him doing the Taser and the stun gun. But MTV did not show him shooting himself. Oh, don’t worry, we found the footage.
Tom Salinsky: Were you in the UK when Derren Brown did his Russian Roulette TV special?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom Salinsky: That was incredible.
Abigoliah: I’ve heard about this, though.
Tom Salinsky: That was live. And he did this whole thing. Most of the show was pre-recorded, finding the guy who would be his helpmeet. And he ended up being really good friends with this guy who had to pick which chamber the bullet was in.
Abigoliah: Well, because Johnny Knoxville wasn’t a gun guy, he borrowed the gun from a friend and he loads it—and you can see it in the footage. It’s so scary, and we will show it to you. He’s holding it to his chest because someone else was supposed to shoot him and everyone refused.
Tom Salinsky: That feels safer.
Abigoliah: So he’s holding it to his chest, like point-blank range to his chest. And because he didn’t load it right, you just hear click, click, click, click.
Tom Watts: It’s like watching someone play Russian roulette.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. It’s insane.
So they filmed it. Tremaine saw it and he thought, “Wow, this guy is great,” because the rest of the lads that were on the Big Brother tapes, they were funny. But because Johnny Knoxville had already been in Hollywood for ten years, he could do the one thing the rest of them couldn’t. He could look down the camera and present. It’s just him being like, “Hi, I’m Johnny Knoxville and I’m testing out all this self-defence equipment,” and he kind of goes through it. And all the other guys were like, “Hey!” and jump off stuff.
And one could argue that’s where it all started.
Johnny Knoxville was seeded into the Big Brother family, and that’s where he met Chris Pontius, who was another writer, Dave England, and the guy who was managing their subscriptions was a local skater named Jason “Wee Man” Acuña.
Steve-O was also a young skater living out in Florida. He had dropped out of Miami University to attend the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. Fun fact: I dated a guy who went to that clown college with Steve-O.
When he graduated, Ringling Brothers did not hire him, so he wound up in a circus at the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop flea market, which sounds as grim as it must be. And he really wasn’t having a good time, and he knew about Big Brother and he wanted in so bad. He said he’d do anything to get in with these skater boys with Big Brother magazine. So he’d start to film himself doing stunts in Florida, like jumping off buildings into swimming pools. He was really famous for setting himself on fire and doing backflips. And finally it worked, and they started to put him in the videos.
Now, on the other side of the country, while Big Brother was making this controversial magazine—which, by the way, do you want to explain a little bit more what Big Brother was? Because Big Brother was like the bad boy of skater magazines.
Tom Salinsky: Is it like a National Lampoon kind of thing?
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. So they’d have articles in them about skaters and skating, and they’d have still shots of tricks so people could learn them. Spike Jonze was a photographer for them.
Tom Watts: And skate magazines would… because it was a counterculture, they would try and push the envelope a bit. But it was within relatively confined levels of decency. Like, you’re always getting chased by security guards, and that’s part of the bit.
But what was his name again?
Abigoliah: Steve Rocco.
Tom Watts: Steve Rocco, World Industries.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Steve Rocco founded a skate company called World Industries that made T-shirts and skateboards and stuff like this.
Tom Watts: And with his advertisements that he put in skate magazines, he kept trying to find the limit and push the boundaries as much as possible. And then it got to a point where one advert he submitted to—I think it was… I mean, he submitted to them all, so Thrasher would have been one of them—but it got rejected. It was a kid holding a gun to his head. And all the magazines said, “Absolutely not. We are not going to run your advert.”
So he said, “I will make my own magazine where there are no limits.”
Tom Salinsky: Was it National Lampoon who had the cover with the picture of “Buy this magazine or the puppy dies”?
Tom Watts: Probably. The vibe sounds very similar.
Abigoliah: And they had a magazine cover where someone was doing a skate jump over a large stack of Bibles that were on fire. They did an article on how to kill yourself, which they thought was funny.
Tom Watts: But also it sort of…
Abigoliah: Another one on how to buy crack.
Tom Watts: It’s taking a skateboarding magazine, which was mostly about skating, and then sort of cultural articles about skating, and then really running with the gonzo journalism aspect of it, where it’s, “Let’s go and just live these really out-there experiences and just try and push the envelope as much as possible as us doing it as well.”
Abigoliah: On a side note, I put deodorant on my forehead before, and it’s made no difference. So again, if you’re watching on YouTube, I am sorry.
At the same time that Big Brother was making this controversial magazine and these VHS tapes, there was a group of skateboarders in West Chester, Pennsylvania, making their own videos, and they were called CKY, which stood for Camp Kill Yourself. It was the ’90s, baby. We just did anything.
They consisted of Bam Margera, who was kind of like the ringleader, Ryan Dunn, Brandon DiCamillo, Raab Himself, Rake Yohn, and Bam was already a skateboarding prodigy at the time. And when he first started to make his own videos, he realised that his friends would get bored after he showed them the fifth awesome stunt he could do. And so they started to seed in pranks and stunts. And of course they had the crash montage. What’s it called? The…
Tom Watts: Slam…
Abigoliah: Slam section.
Tom Watts: Section.
Abigoliah: Slam section. Yeah. See? That’s why Tom’s here. The slam section at the end.
And the CKY videos then also became this huge cult hit as well. So the Big Brother crew and CKY teamed up to try to pitch this show.
Director Jeff Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville were trying to come up with a format for Jackass. At first they were like, “Oh, maybe we’ll have Johnny Knoxville sitting behind a desk and then reporting, and then we cut to footage.”
And it was actually Spike Jonze who was like, “You have the CKY videos. You have the Big Brother videos. Just use those.”
And so that’s why the show looks the way it does, where it’s just someone being like, “Hi, I’m Steve-O, and this is the Tropical Pole Vault,” and then he does a weird stunt. It fades to black, and then there’s another one.
Tom Salinsky: Because this is the Handycam era, of course. So this is before phones, but we have Handycams. We have little portable video recorders that you can hold in your hand and jump off a mountain with.
Abigoliah: Yeah. All of this is done on VHS.
In that first season of Jackass that went out on MTV, they were never together. That is all footage from the CKY VHSs and the Big Brother VHSs that they just cut together. So at that point, I mean, it’s basically a best-of reel that they put on.
Tom Salinsky: It’s basically You’ve Been Framed! before You’ve Been Framed!.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Or after You’ve Been Framed!, isn’t it?
Tom Salinsky: I don’t know.
Abigoliah: This came out in 2000.
Tom Salinsky: Again, I have not done any… I don’t know when You’ve Been Framed!… But it’s the same sort of thing. I’m pretty sure there was a sketch show in the 2000s or the ’90s called You’ve Been Hurt. Yeah. Because basically, same thing.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So it’s the same thing.
And MTV paid for the pilot to be filmed, but there was actually a bidding war. Comedy Central also wanted it, and SNL wanted it. Lorne wanted to use Jackass as a recurring segment in SNL, and I’m so glad that never happened.
Tom Salinsky: Well, it would have completely neutered it, wouldn’t it?
Tom Watts: Yeah, 100%. It would have written it to death.
Tom Salinsky: SNL is as daring as you’re allowed to be while being on NBC. Yeah, which is not hella daring.
Abigoliah: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And this is—I wrote this for you, because this is where you wanted to talk about this.
Tom Watts: Well, I think that’s a really important point as well, because the Jackass crew aren’t comedians. They’re enthusiastic idiots. But I think what’s really interesting about Jackass is its irreducible comedy. Any comedy writing you try and add on top dilutes it. You can watch Jackass in any language. It doesn’t matter, because farts are funny.
Tom Salinsky: I mean, do you know what the oldest fiction film in the world was?
Tom Watts: It’s about a cabbage.
Tom Salinsky: No. It was the gardener watering the garden, and the little boy steps on the hose. And then, when he looks down the end of the hose to see what’s gone wrong, the boy takes his foot off. Three shots. And that was the first fiction film ever made.
Tom Watts: Really?
Tom Salinsky: Well, its authorship is disputed because, as soon as it came out, it was such a hit—and copyright didn’t exist for films because we hadn’t figured that out yet. So, like, thirty people made their own version. But yes, it was a much less exclusively male enterprise in those years because it was the Wild West. Anyone could do anything. But yes, the first fiction film is this irreducible comedy.
Tom Watts: Yeah.
Tom Salinsky: It’s a great phrase.
Abigoliah: There’s one in one of the films—and we don’t have this—but just to explain how Knoxville’s brain works. There’s one where—and this is just backstage, this isn’t like a stunt, this is him just fucking around—he asks one of the crew to put talcum powder on his butt, and then he leans over the director, Jeff Tremaine, who is napping, to fart in his face because he wanted it to poof. And it happens. And obviously, because Knoxville can’t see, it’s just him farting and going, “Did it poof? Did it poof?”
Tom Watts: The talcum powder fart was Knoxville’s white whale. He’d been chasing that for a while.
Abigoliah: And lighting a fart underwater was something that they’d… They do it in Jackass Forever, because we’ve watched all four of them. We’re going to go see Jackass 5 this weekend, and we had to watch all four to make sure that we completely understood Jackass 5.
Tom Salinsky: Some of the nuances might have gone right by you.
Abigoliah: I know! But in Jackass Forever they are like, “We have been waiting twenty years to figure out how to light a fart on fire,” and they get someone from…
Tom Watts: Tory from the MythBusters.
Tom Salinsky: Yeah, I’m going to say, this sounds like MythBusters.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. They get the MythBusters involved to help them figure out the science. So, I mean, it’s irreducible comedy, but it’s also physics.
Tom Watts: I think it’s also science. There’s so much joy in getting a view into how Johnny Knoxville views the world, because you can see that he believes Road Runner is real. That’s how he sees the world. He thinks you can tie rockets to your skates and skate fast.
Tom Salinsky: You can paint a road onto the side of a rock.
Tom Watts: And he’ll try.
Tom Salinsky: It, and go right through.
Tom Watts: With full belief that it will work.
Tom Salinsky: They did that with driverless cars. Did you see that?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom Salinsky: Because Elon Musk is convinced that driverless cars don’t need LiDAR. They only need cameras. But if you paint a roadway onto a brick wall and send one of Elon Musk’s cars straight towards it, it won’t stop.
Abigoliah: Oh, of course it won’t.
[Clip plays]
Tom Watts: Should join the Jackass crew. Yeah, big member, right?
Abigoliah: Hey, you know what? It’s good footage. It’s not a good car, but it’s good footage. And that’s the Jackass spirit.
Tom Salinsky: And MythBusters were always blowing things up. It was always, like, 60% science and 40% “How big an explosion can we get on camera?”
Abigoliah: Yeah, of course.
Tom Watts: Blowing things up is fun.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So the first episode aired on October 1st, 2000, and these guys became overnight celebrities. Bam Margera was already kind of known because he was a big skater. I don’t think you’ve ever played this video game, but he is featured in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
Tom Salinsky: I’ve heard tell of this.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So they aired it, they became overnight celebrities, and everyone thought they were great. Young boys wanted to be them and be their friends. And these guys would laugh harder than probably anyone who was watching at the own chaos they were making.
Do you want to talk about what it was like to watch it as a kid, and what the result of watching Jackass was?
Tom Watts: We hadn’t really seen anything like it. The culture was prepped for it, and then when it landed, it was our Summer of Love. It was suddenly like, you can be as free and joyful as you like.
Tom Salinsky: And are you not getting a tea tray and putting it at the top of the stairs, and sitting on it to see what would happen?
Tom Watts: Exactly. MTV were really worried about people trying it at home. And of course people were trying it at home, because it was fun.
Abigoliah: Do you want to explain antiquing real quick? Because that was a funny look on that face.
Tom Watts: So antiquing is the art of, if you’re having a party at a friend’s house, everyone’s had too many refreshments and maybe has fallen asleep on the sofa. What you do is you get a big handful of flour and throw it at their head. Then, when they wake up, they fully embody the resemblance of an antique sculpture.
Tom Salinsky: Right.
Tom Watts: And then we all have a good laugh about it. They usually take it very well, with their eyes gummed up with flour. And now the room is entirely covered in flour.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So this did become a problem. Eventually hospitals started to fill up with kids trying to replicate the Jackass stunts.
Tom Watts: A really important point on that, going back as well, is when it landed. Me and all my… I grew up on a council estate below the poverty line. We were all broke skater kids. It was anti-establishment, but it was free. You saw people having the best times of their lives, and the price of entry was free, which is such a contrast to present-day influencers. You can’t sell free. It’s really hard to make a commission on free, so you have to sell the idea that fun is expensive. You have to have the fast car or go to the expensive bars, and no one looks like they’re having fun.
Whereas when we saw Jackass and CKY for the first time, it was, “This looks like so much fun.” And I look back on it as some of the best times I’ve had with that group of… I mean, you’ve met my Falmouth mates from Cornwall, doing this kind of just stupid stuff, but just having a really good time doing it.
Abigoliah: All you needed was a bag of flour and a good fart brewing, and you could do a Jackass stunt.
Eventually, though, the thing that turned everything sour was that in 2001 a Connecticut teen wound up in hospital with third-degree burns because they accidentally set themselves on fire trying to do a stunt. And that’s when the moral panic really kicked off.
Senator Joe Lieberman was running for election that year and decided to make his campaign about being tough on Hollywood, and really singled out Jackass and MTV. MTV saw that this was a potential source of lawsuits and liability, and that’s when they started to crack down on the Jackass lads.
And of this, Johnny Knoxville said:
“We had a safety guy assigned to our show. We couldn’t jump off anything higher than four feet. And it just became ridiculous to the point where it was no longer the show we wanted to do.”
Tom Watts: So is that the point? On that point as well, Johnny Knoxville was completely right, because I don’t want to watch Jackass people do something I could do. If I would happily jump off it, it’s not gnarly.
Abigoliah: Four feet is not gnarly, dude.
Tom Watts: It’s not gnarly. Four feet isn’t gnarly.
Tom Salinsky: At the same time, you don’t want your crazy knockabout comedy show to actually have a body count.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So, you know, swings and roundabouts.
Tom Watts: I’m quite ambivalent about it.
Abigoliah: You’re like, “I did them all and I’m still alive.”
Tom Salinsky: It does remind me of the Bill Hicks line about the… it’s always the same story: “A young boy on drugs thought he could fly, jumped out of a window.” You think you can fly? Try it out on the ground. We lost a moron. This guy was never going to be a senator. He was never going to be a brain surgeon.
Tom Watts: But we were the crowd that were watching Jackass. We were all skating. We were all hurting. We were perfectly capable of hurting ourselves without Jackass.
Tom Salinsky: Yes.
Tom Watts: Also true. Like snowboarding, like you’re saying about scars. I’ve got an arm full of metal from a severe fracture. I dislocated my arm snowboarding. I broke my neck. I’ve broken somewhere between ten and twenty bones.
Abigoliah: And then, two weeks ago, he dislocated his collarbone in his sleep. So stay in school, kids, and wear your pads.
Tom Watts: Sleep has become really gnarly.
Tom Salinsky: I broke this finger when I was about eleven. That’s my limit.
Abigoliah: I broke a toe. That’s my limit. You and me, we’re the safety kids.
Tom Watts: But the people that hurt themselves watching Jackass either would have hurt themselves anyway, or… who cares? That’s my position on it.
Abigoliah: Well, because it just changed it and made it no fun any more. Johnny Knoxville quit, which… part of him was like, “That’s really dumb.” He spent ten years trying to get something going in Hollywood, and now he’s on this number one show, and they all walk away.
But MTV didn’t want to lose this cash cow, and luckily, at the time, they had just launched MTV Films. So they suggested the guys turn Jackass into a movie. And that’s how we get the first movie in 2002, Jackass: The Movie.
And the head of Paramount at the time, Sherry Lansing, just took Tremaine, the director, aside and said, “Just make it bigger and crazier than anything you did on TV.” And that’s what they did. They could put an R rating in front of it, so then automatically it’s not for kids. So even if kids watch it—which, of course, we all did—they’re no longer liable.
And after that Jackass had two spin-off shows: Viva La Bam with Bam Margera and Wildboyz with Chris Pontius and Steve-O.
Viva La Bam was… do you want to explain the cultural impact of Viva La Bam?
Tom Watts: So Jackass was already very familiar to the skate culture, but it was more of a vibe than maybe a specific cultural identity. Whereas Viva La Bam really started to set what that social in-group identity would be, where then music started to come into it, and fashion started to come into it more, leaning much more into the rock-and-roll lifestyle.
Viva La Bam essentially documents the downfall of Bam Margera, who tried to maintain a rock-and-roll party life indefinitely, but without the rock-and-roll part.
Tom Salinsky: Yeah.
Tom Watts: Well, Bam was famous for being a skater.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom Watts: But then skating fell by the wayside, and then he became famous because he was a sort of rock-and-roll party… so all that was left was just the persona of a rock star, but without the rock music to go with it.
Abigoliah: It’s like he was…
Tom Watts: Tragic.
Abigoliah: …a skater. But at one point, you know, he couldn’t do that any more.
Jackass: The Movie came out in 2002. It was followed by Jackass Number Two and Jackass 3D, which was a movie in 3D that came out in 2010.
Tom Watts: As a cinematographer—and this is a hill I will absolutely die on—Jackass 3D is the only film that has ever fully understood the point of 3D cinema.
3D is a complete gimmick, and it’s always been a gimmick. As a cinematographer, I’ve watched the new Blade Runner in 3D, and it ruins it. It completely ruins the cinematography, because you’re taking a 3D thing, making it 2D very purposefully, then you bring it back to 3D. It ruins it.
Tom Salinsky: Jackass 3D is stereoscopic.
Tom Watts: Yeah. It’s just 3D. There’s no film that’s better with it except Jackass, which just 100% leaned into it. Watching that in the cinema in 3D is one of the best cinema experiences I’ve ever had.
Abigoliah: You’ve got dildos flying at you. You’ve got…
Tom Watts: Poop.
Abigoliah: …poop flying at you. It’s great.
Tom Salinsky: All I’ve ever wanted. Sign me up.
Abigoliah: Now, between 2010 and Jackass Forever, which came out in 2022, we do have some tragedies.
In 2011 Ryan Dunn, who was part of the Jackass crew—part of the CKY crew—was driving home from a bar with a friend of his. They were intoxicated, and he ran directly into a tree, killing him and his friend.
And you’re going to meet Ryan in what we have to show you. And I’ve got to say, he, I think, might be my favourite cast member.
Tom Watts: He’s the glue.
Abigoliah: Yeah. He’s kind of the everyman, where the rest of them are… I mean, Steve-O was like, “Hey!” Ryan’s just like, “Dude, what the fuck?”
Tom Watts: There’s a really clear change—and I think downfall—in Jackass following Ryan’s death. It shifted in a way that’s not positive. And you can tell. I assume you’re going to rush to probably watch them all now.
Tom Salinsky: I would not be a completist.
Tom Watts: So there is a really noticeable difference with Ryan Dunn, and then Bam’s absence.
Tom Salinsky: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Well, and see, that’s what happens.
So Ryan Dunn dies tragically. Bam Margera was best friends with him and said he’d probably never recover from the death of his friend. He fell heavily into drinking and drugs.
When they all got back together in 2022 to film Jackass Forever, they put Bam under a very strict sobriety clause where he was drug-tested regularly during filming and breathalysed even between shoots. He was unable to maintain his sobriety during that show, therefore had to leave.
So Bam and Ryan are not in Jackass Forever.
And you can see that Steve-O also had huge problems with addiction as well. Basically Johnny Knoxville and Tremaine and the crew kind of had an intervention for him and took him away and put him into a rehab centre, and he has stayed sober for now probably fifteen years, I think.
Tom Watts: Since Jackass 3, I think.
Abigoliah: Yeah, since Jackass 3, which is amazing.
But Bam didn’t get that treatment because they were trying to film a show, and I don’t know if he was ready to get sober.
From what I can tell, he is sober now. He’s been sober for maybe a year, year and a half, and he’s starting to make videos and skate again, which is really good to see.
In Jackass: Best and Last, that comes out June 26th. It will be a compilation of really old footage and some new footage. From what I can tell, Bam is in the old footage, but he hasn’t come back to work with the guys as a cast member again. He’s kind of fallen away from them.
And I just want to close on this quote. That was all very sad, but I just want to close on this quote by Chris Pontius, who said:
“Jackass was about us being the butt of the joke in the end. I don’t want to do anything mean. It’s supposed to be just mean to us. That was always the rule.”
So you’ll see them going out and doing pranks in public, but they never put any of the public in danger.
And we’ve really got to wrap up because we’ve got to get out of this freaking room.
But we’ll pick back up with Jackass Part Two. That is where we will show the watch-along and we will get Tom’s reaction.
For those of you who join the Patreon to see Part Two, just so you know, we will be watching Season 1, Episode 1 of Jackass: The Series, and Tom Watts has also put together a clip show for us of another twenty-five minutes, so you can see more of it. The footage is a VHS of a VHS of a VHS, so it’s not the best quality.
Tom Salinsky: Listen, you know I was watching 1960s Doctor Who videos that had been pirated for me multiple generations from when the repeats had been shown in Australia, so I’m perfectly familiar with this process.
Abigoliah: You’re used to it.
And I just want to say, those of you who join the Patreon, the footage that we show Tom Salinsky today will not be on the Patreon.
Tom Salinsky: There won’t be a secret link there where you can get access to it or anything like that. Nope. We’d love to be able to do that, but unfortunately copyright rules mean we absolutely can’t.
Abigoliah: We can’t.
Tom Salinsky: So don’t join thinking you’ll be able to get that.
Abigoliah: Because…
Tom Salinsky: …you won’t.
Abigoliah: You won’t. You absolutely will not.
And just a reminder, the Patreon is £5 a month. For Part Two of Jackass we will be talking about its cultural influences.
But before we go there, Tom Watts, do you have any plugs? Where can people find you? And thank you for joining us here on All British… American Comedy Explained.
Tom Watts: It’s been an absolute pleasure, and you can find me on tomwatts.dp on Instagram and MischiefDonovan on TikTok.
Abigoliah: Very cool. Tom makes really funny videos where he talks about current events, and I highly recommend you check it out.
Salinsky, do you have anything to plug?
Tom Salinsky: I think by now tickets for the tour of The Gang of Three will be on sale. So we’re back at the King’s Head for a couple of weeks, and then we’re going to Oxford, Cambridge, Chichester, Guildford and Richmond.
Abigoliah: Okay, cool.
Tom Salinsky: So yes, I think there is now a website at gangofthethreeplay.com, something like that. I’ll put it in the show notes.
Abigoliah: Okay, cool.
And my book is on sale. It is out: Neurodivergent Moments. You can buy it wherever books are sold.
That all being said, what do you expect to see? What are your predictions?
Tom Salinsky: Well, I mean, I never thought the words “Okay, let’s go and watch Jackass now” would ever come out of my mouth.
I have seen clips. I kind of do know the vibe. So this isn’t going to be quite as baffling to me as some of the things that I’ve shown you.
But I guess what I’m asking is, will it work on me? Will it seduce me? Or will I just sit here like a curmudgeon going, “Well, this is all very silly, isn’t it?”
I hope I’ll be able to enter into the spirit of it, because that’s what I do try and do.
Tom Watts: I’m so curious, and I really hope that, probably more in the second half, it can make a convincing argument.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom Salinsky: I mean, the big question for me is: is it a comedy show?
Abigoliah: Oh, it’s a comedy show.
Okay, we’ve been watching it since Monday. We’ve just been watching clips and stuff, and I feel so up.
Tom Watts: I’ve never laughed more at a show.
Tom Salinsky: Let’s do—
Abigoliah: The Fall and Rise never did this for me.
All right, let’s go.