Jackass! What a Blast!

Jackass! What a blast! How I first discovered the film franchise was when I needed a mood lightener. I was studying philosophy at the time and really needed a laugh, and so I searched for ‘wacky films’ online. And boy, what a discovery.


Just briefly, Jackass is a series of movies where a group of stuntmen carry out outrageous over-the-top stunts just for the sheer hell of it. The movies are a bunch of unrelated vignettes performed by one or several members of the cast with the others milling around watching and laughing so hard they are gasping. Some of the stunts are bonkers. One of my favourites was where skateboarder Bam Margera set off fireworks in his parent’s bedroom while they were fast asleep, knowing full well that his father Phil had to go to work at 5am. As if that wasn’t enough, when Phil later got into his van to drive to work, it was round 2 of fireworks, in the van. It was nuts but why I named it as a favourite was because it actually made me laugh, out loud. I know that when people today type LOL on their phones, they probably weren’t actually LOLing. But there I was, seriously laughing aloud. I don’t normally do that. I respond to funny sequencies in comedies with absolute silence, no smile even. I find it amusing in my head but I don’t make a sound. Normally. Jackass made me laugh out loud.

There is a lot to say for the movies’ comedic value. You will wonder how they do not injure themselves since the stunts and pranks do not seem to protect the actors well enough. It is them driving a golf buggy at top speed and jumping over bumps and crashing, on top of each other. It is them giving each other electric shocks with a collar or a stun gun. It was them playing a game standing in their underwear, where if they answer the questions wrongly, they get smacked in the groin. How about being launched into the air while you are in one of those blue plastic portable toilets? After watching for a while, you might think you are going to get used to the type of stunts they are going to pull. No. Somehow, the crew manage to surprise you with totally different types of jokes, like going into an electronics shop in Tokyo and then stripping and dancing in a g-string in front of a straightlaced salesman. Or lighting farts.

The serious-minded might watch Jackass and be thinking, this kind of low-grade humour might not even be deserving of the name of humour, instead relegating it to nonsense. They might be thinking that such films reflect the decadence and deterioration of artistry in our world, where trash can pull in massive audiences. The franchise has been a huge success, with 5 sequels, sometimes hitting number 1 at the box office on its opening weekend. Indeed these serious minded people may be right but I think they got things upside down. What we get in a consumerist capitalist society is what the masses want, and it is not the filmmakers’ fault that the audience wants this kind of banal perhaps tasteless entertainment. It says something about the state of our society, it is us who are degraded and base. But I have 4 further thoughts on this line of thinking.

1) John Stuart Mill talks about two classes of pleasure, the higher ones and then the lower base animalistic ones. He thinks that we’d choose the higher pleasures over the lower ones anytime, for instance the pleasure of acquiring scientific or philosophical knowledge, or enjoying classical music or impressionist art. I think he is mistaken. I think sometimes we want to eat the finest steak and drink the fanciest wines, but sometimes we just want to eat sausages or hamburgers with fries and top it off with an unhealthy overly sweet beverage. Sometimes we want to listen to Bach, sometimes to rap. It depends on our mood. Why? I think it matches the multiple sides of ourselves. We have a side that seeks beauty and purity, who want to enjoy the sublime and the highly intellectual. We have a side that seeks trash, dirt, scum, disgust, toilet humour, filth, and that side wants the opposite to the pure. Sometimes. Why do we think pornography is so popular?

2) One of the things that most amazes me about human beings is that as a species we push ourselves to the limits. We take a game and elevate it into an art. Just watch the Olympics or football, chess, snooker, billiards, pool or dart championships or F1. I realised this when I went to a bullfight in Spain. I am against animal cruelty but after the first few rounds, I began to understand why bullfighting is a thing and why people are attracted to it. It is a blend of danger, skill and artistry. We have a way of taking any pursuit and pushing it to its limits of magnificence and perfection. What is so great about running 100m really fast or lifting ever heavier weights above our heads? An ordinary sedan car or a hyena can beat the fastest runner. A machine can move weights 1000 times heavier. We aren’t cheering those or gathering in stadiums to watch them. I think that we celebrate our sportsman because these athletes are pushing the limits of human physical abilities and demonstrating to us what is possible if we really wanted. This is not only in the sports arena. We see this in the arts, where we create such elaborate and ethereal pieces of music, dance, or painting. We see this in the world of thought, where people push the boundaries of human knowledge or write incredibly imaginative books and make beautiful and profound movies. We see this in Jackass, where the stuntmen go to such extremes that we are shocked. They are pushing the limits of what is crass, gross, and outrageous and the audience apparently wants more, judging by the sequels that keep happening.

3) Those thinking that the stuntmen acting in Jackass are debased and lack moral values will be pleased to find that they actually have a kind of moral code, though they do not explicitly announce it. They do not hurt the animals they use in the stunts. There are sequences involving a bear, scorpion, vulture, bees, spider and snake. The actors were careful not to hurt the animals, while the animals gave bites and stings to the actors. They also do not injure bystanders which is more than I can say from some of the stuff people pull online on youtube or tiktok or on shows like Just for Laughs or Candid Camera. Jackass’s stuntmen are professionals who can take care of themselves and they are the ones profiting from the movies. Bystanders do not and so their safety is taken care of while not compromising the humour of the scene. The actors can do whatever they want to themselves but they do not inflict pain on others which is more than I can say for some groups who seem to think they can inflict their own standards on others who do not even share their beliefs, like who people should sleep with, how they should behave, and what people can do with their bodies. In that way, Jackass is more moral than these so-called moral groups.

4) Jackass does what they purportedly aim to do. They never claimed they were making high art. They are making a humour movie with crazy stunts. No one is tricked into watching this thinking it was going to be a piece of highly intellectual or emotionally engaging masterpiece of film. What they do leave us with however, might actually be intellectual, like the thoughts I have articulated here and those of other thinkers who have published academic essays on the franchise, and the audience may have been affected emotionally, at least in the laughter department. And for this reason, I would say that if you are in the mood for something whack, Jackass may be the show for you.

What do you think? Am I overthinking this? Are we just giving in to our banal side in making and enjoying a movie like Jackass or does even such a movie remind us of the triumph of the human spirit? Please leave a comment, would love to hear from you, and please like share and subscribe to the PB.