2008 Woodie Awards
If you're going to be dumb, you've got to be tough
Joe McCormack '07
Issue date: 9/28/06 Section: Arts & Entertainment
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In case anyone wasn't sure, Jackass Number Two proves that farting, nudity, pain, and surprises are funny. Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, and the rest of the crew return to the big screen with their usual formula of bombastic displays of toughness, horrific displays of injury, and gratuitous displays of human flesh. As Dave England comments at one point, it gets worse every time. Even if you like this sort of thing, you'll go back and forth between riotous laughter, moans of sympathy pain, and groans of utter disgust.
America first met this band of skateboarders, masochists, and pranksters on the show Jackass as bored young men amusing themselves with simple means: Chugging milk, regurgitating live fish, messing with people on the street, hitting each other in the reproductive organs, jumping into shopping carts and flying full tilt into bushes and, of course, drinking heavily.
Their success has made them rich, but it has not kept them from being bored. The key difference now is the budget. They can place a four-person seesaw in the middle of a bullfighting ring and see who lasts the longest. They can get in full makeup and walk the streets as a very convincing naked elderly woman. They can attach rockets to those aforementioned shopping carts. They can drink very heavily.
The dynamic that differentiates the Jackass empire from a mere masochistic backyard videotape is the personalities of the men performing these stunts. These personalities also serve to distinguish three types of Jackass combatants.
The simplest is Steve-O. His way of drawing laughs comes from abusing his body grotesquely, like a walking horror flick. At one point in the film, he sticks a hook through his cheek (which takes about two agonizing minutes) and swims in shark infested waters as "bait."
Next is Bam, the pretty-boy skateboarder who is filmed crying on two separate occasions because the heat gets a bit too hot. He prays at one point that there will be no Jackass Number Three.
America first met this band of skateboarders, masochists, and pranksters on the show Jackass as bored young men amusing themselves with simple means: Chugging milk, regurgitating live fish, messing with people on the street, hitting each other in the reproductive organs, jumping into shopping carts and flying full tilt into bushes and, of course, drinking heavily.
Their success has made them rich, but it has not kept them from being bored. The key difference now is the budget. They can place a four-person seesaw in the middle of a bullfighting ring and see who lasts the longest. They can get in full makeup and walk the streets as a very convincing naked elderly woman. They can attach rockets to those aforementioned shopping carts. They can drink very heavily.
The dynamic that differentiates the Jackass empire from a mere masochistic backyard videotape is the personalities of the men performing these stunts. These personalities also serve to distinguish three types of Jackass combatants.
The simplest is Steve-O. His way of drawing laughs comes from abusing his body grotesquely, like a walking horror flick. At one point in the film, he sticks a hook through his cheek (which takes about two agonizing minutes) and swims in shark infested waters as "bait."
Next is Bam, the pretty-boy skateboarder who is filmed crying on two separate occasions because the heat gets a bit too hot. He prays at one point that there will be no Jackass Number Three.