Send in the clowns

Johnny Knoxville

Born Phillip John ‘P.J.’ Clapp in Knoxville, Tenessee, the young Johnny Knoxville suffered from chronic asthma as a kid, and at one point fell prey to simultaneous bouts of flu, pnuemonia and bronchitis. Somewhat against the odds, he survived and developed the invincibility complex that enabled him to ultimately become overlord of the Jackasses.
Of course, as Freud once noted “Comedy is sadism” and it helped that Johnny was raised by a suitably malevolent and inspirational prankster.

“The person who had the biggest effect on my sense of humour was my father, because he was always pulling pranks on me and his employees,” says Knoxville. “One of my favourites was the time he gave all his employees, at the tyre factory he owned, chocolate milkshakes filled with Ex-Lax.”

At university, Johnny specialised in Oriental Philosophy and wrote a dissertation on ‘Great Women In History’, though when I ask him about his academic background, he responds by chanting – “Coddlestone, coddlestone, coddlestone pie. Why can’t I bird, when a bird can fly. You ask me a riddle and I’ll tell you why. Coddlestone, coddlestone coddlestone pie.” Maybe he’s making a point about how elusive the writings of Confucius are, but it’s a line of questioning I decide it’s best not to pursue.

After college, Knoxville moved to Hollywood with the intention of becoming a movie star, but he soon found himself on the auditioning circuit for commercials, supplementing his meagre income with work as a freelance journalist for various magazines, including Big Brother.

It was there that the idea for Jackass was born, and following on from some jocular “You ain’t from around here boy” exchanges with Bam’s CKY crew, the two joined forces for the TV series. “We were really amazed how the show took off from there,” admits Knoxville. “We were really just doing stuff for us.”

For our meeting, Knoxville is lounging in his newly acquired Ireland Rugby shirt. He professes to finding the sport “really cool” since being repeatedly mauled by the charging forwards of the London Irish for a segment on Jackass. Even sprawled and hungover though, Knoxville is far from what could pass for relaxed. He has the intensity and demeanour of Henry Rollins without the happy-go-lucky ray-of-sunshine giddiness. Even from behind the trademark shades, you can feel his stare just as surely as if someone were taking a pneumatic drill to the cranium. For all the ingenuity displayed by the Jackass schtick, this is far from your average clown and certainly isn’t someone that’ll be touring the kiddy party circuit anytime soon.

That said, he’s a settled family man married to fashion designer Melanie, and until he quit Jackass in 2001 to take a role in Men In Black II, he always took care to put together a clean version of the show for his six-year old daughter, Madison. “That’s something that bugs me,” he says. “I really don’t want kids watching the show who don’t have a constant dialogue with their parents.”

Now that Jackass is over, Knoxville is focusing on his film career though, to date, he’s been unlucky with his choice of roles. The 2001 comedy, Life Without Dick, in which he took the title role, failed to secure a cinema release, while the action thriller Big Trouble which featured a nuclear bomb aboard a plane was pushed back indefinitely after September 11.

Still, hopefully the forthcoming Grand Theft Parsons should fare better. The film sees Knoxville playing Phil Kaufman, the manager of angel-voiced legend Gram Parsons, who stole the singer’s body after he died.

“It should be good,” Knoxville tells me. “I’m just going to keep on with some acting and I’ll keep up the stuff with Dickhouse, which is the production company I have with Spike Jonze and Jeff here.”

And if it all goes wrong, can we expect Jackass the reunion?

“No fucking way. At least not for sixty years, anyway. I’m serious about that.”

Bam Margera

At 22, Bam is the baby of the bunch, and still lives at home in West Chester, Pennsylvania with his long-suffering parents April and Phil, the good natured recepients of constant abuse in the name of entertainment. Indeed, even his uncle’s unfeasibly hairy back has been exploited in the name of Jackass.

Before the TV show, Margera was producing independent videos of similar antics under the ‘CKY’ and ‘CKY2K’ banners.

BM: “Yeah, me and Jeff met at a gay bar and I gave him one of my videos, and he thought I was hot, so he put together some clips and made a pilot.”

So, now that he’s making money, the big question is, will he invest in hair removal therapy for the follically gifted male members of his family?

“Naw. They look terrible and I want to keep it that way!”

So, do the laws of genetics not keep him awake at night?

“Oh, he’s safe,” chips in Johnny Knoxville at this point. “He doesn’t even have any pubic hair. He has no hair on his body whatsoever”, and to demonstrate the point Johnny pulls down Bam’s keks as much as decency will permit – well, a bit lower than that actually, but let’s not split, er, hairs.

Now that his promotional duties for the movie have come to an end, Bam will be resting up.

“I’m just going to chill out. I’m going to this island off Spain called Majorca,” he says. And after that he’ll be returning to the (slightly) less wacky world of professional skateboarding.

Dave England

“It’s bullshit,” says Dave England when the subject of ‘GULF WAR II – THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL’ rears its oily head. “Everyone knows it’s about oil. People will be killing each other, but they’ll dress it up with cool names. Operation Revenge. Something like that.” Still, even if he’s the most outspoken peacenik of the bunch, and the inventor of the ‘poo-hug’ to boot, England does have something in common with a certain warmongering German statesman of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In 1997, a snowboarding accident landed him back first on a rock. After the double hernia operation which followed, he awoke from the anesthesia only to learn that he was now one bollock down. Needless to say, his career as a professional snowboarder was over, and since then, his holy grail is the artificial gonad – “You know, to balance things out.”

With any luck, the box-office takings from the movie will help him realise his dream, though he’s still in shock about the success of the entire Jackass enterprise. “When I heard that Jackass was going to be on MTV,” he recalls, “I thought they meant like one of those little cartoons or something – two or three in the morning. That kind of thing. I can’t believe what’s happened.”

We wish him well with his testicular quest.

Jeff Tremaine

In 1992, Jeff Tremaine was hired as the art/editorial director of a new and struggling skateboard magazine. When he collaborated with then contributor Johnny Knoxville on a story about self-defense equipment, the pair came up with the idea of staging increasingly sadistic stunts for entertainment and personal pleasure. Soon others in the magazine became willing participants in similar antics, before all eventually becoming the Jackasses we know and wince at.

His former production partner Johnny Knoxville may have decided to go into the acting business, but Tremaine fully intends to keep spearheading the decline of Western civilisation with a new TV show.

“It’s got Steve-O and Chris Pontius in it. Don’t worry though – it’s not like Steve-O’s stage show. It’s kind of a nature, educational programme. We’re just going to travel around and go up to dangerous animals and see if anyone gets eaten. Close encounters, that kind of thing.”

Wow, the insurance companies must surely be queuing up to give you a policy for that show?

“Yeah, but that’s always a problem for us. Even on Jackass – The Movie they wouldn’t give us an overall policy,” says Tremaine. “Basically, we had to get each sketch insured separately, and that prohibited us from shooting a couple of things. Like in the Deep South of the United States, they have these churches where they handle rattlesnakes. So we were going to dress Chris Pontius up as the devil and send him into one of these places and handle a bunch of snakes, but the insurance company were going to charge us five million dollars for that bit.”

Why? Because of the snakes or because of the possibility of being clubbed to death by religious rednecks?

“You know, I’m not sure. But I think I would have felt safer with the snakes.”