Suffering for their arse

Hanging out with a cross-section of the Jackass crew in their hotel suite isn’t quite the zany, antic-filled adventure that one might assume from watching their frat-boy inspired TV show. For one thing, when we all hook up it’s the day after the Irish premiere of Jackass – The Movie, and it is immediately clear that the gang are nursing thundering hangovers. There’s the tell-tale bloodshot eyes, the gaunt, dehydrated aspect that one might reasonably expect to find in a group of stranded Sahara Desert survivors, and occasional groans of agony.

Or at least I hope they’re groans of agony. It’s kind of hard to tell, as the lads are all crowded around a lap-top engrossed in the greatest, er ‘hits’ of Traci Lords for half the duration of the interview. How any interviewer is supposed to compete with Ms. Lords’ more athletic feats of double penetration and implausibly gooey cum shots is anyone’s guess. Hell, I’m not even going to think about it.

To complicate matters further, there are considerable logistical difficulties in making my questions even semi-audible across the near incessant cacophony of appreciative farmyard animal noises being directed at the computer screen by an eager audience comprised of Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Jeff Tremaine and Dave England. Chris ‘Party Boy’ Pontius who was also in Dublin for the occasion, is somehow indisposed. (“Let’s just say that when he leaves Dublin, he ain’t going to be Party Boy no more,” explains Margera when I enquire as to his absence. “He’s going to be ‘Party Man’.”)

I’m torn. For the initial 20 minutes of our encounter, between the apparent alcohol poisoning and the porno, I’m not sure whether I should have come equipped with a cattle prod, to prompt these boys along when their responses to questions prove ludicrously distracted and succinct (occasionally in grunt form), or with elephant tranquilisers to cope with their animalistic outbursts. Okay, we get there in the end, but I still seriously doubt that anyone alive possesses the levels of zoological expertise required to adequately deal with this particular gig.

To be fair, Dublin is the last stop on a gruelling six-month long promotional tour for Jackass – The Movie , and Johnny Knoxville in particular admits to being thoroughly pissed off dealing with the press “The worst part is that a lot of times people just want to do interviews and stuff with me,” he complains. He’s reserving a particularly malicious spot within his heart for some of his recent appearances on British television, in particular the BBC light entertainment fluff-fest Liquid News, which saw him placed on a sofa beside Danni Minogue and being quizzed on issues as diverse as Kylie’s official ‘nipple-tweaker’ all the way through to J-Lo’s official ‘nipple-tweaker’.

“That was a horrible mistake” scowls Knoxville. “I just shouldn’t have agreed to do that show in the first place. Some of that stuff I should have turned down flat. It was nasty and really lame.”

If Knoxville was uncomfortable, it’s hardly surprising. The Jackass boys are hardly the most likely candidates to be touring the same ‘look-at-me’ circuit as the Minogue sisters.
Only a few years ago, Johnny Knoxville was a mere freelance journalist for Big Brother Skateboarding Magazine on the West Coast, when his art/editorial director Jeff Tremaine decided to capitalise on Johnny’s less than graceful boarding style, by sending him on increasingly dangerous assignments and filming the results.

The rest of the magazine’s staff (including Chris Pontius, Dave England, Steve-O and Jason ‘Wee Man’ Acuna) were soon embroiled in similarly depraved stunts for the amusement of the skateboarding community and beyond. Meanwhile, across the country, Bam Margera (together with family and assorted friends: Ryan Dunn, Brandon Dicamillo and Ehren McGehey) were producing independent videos of a similarly anarchic, self-harming ilk.

After these two disparate groups hooked up (“It was like two rival bloods brought together for a common cause,” quips Knoxville) Tremaine and Knoxville formed Dickhouse Productions with film director Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) and they decided to pitch a TV show, combining the best of both entities’ “skills”. MTV ultimately won out over the Comedy Channel to air the series, and Jackass’ winning blend of the outrageous and the downright retarded became an overnight success after it premiered in 2000.

Though Knoxville left the TV series after 24 episodes, and the show has since ended completely, fellow founder members of Dickhouse – Jackass director Tremaine and producer Spike Jonze – coaxed Knoxville back for one last feature-length blast. Undoubtedly, the promise of exotic location shooting and the beer sponsorship helped swing his decision, and as a result the decidedly non-Oscar nominated Jackass – The Movie came to pass. (“We were visibly displeased when the Oscar nominations came out and we weren’t there,” claims Knoxville.)

So was one of their primary objectives in bringing Jackass to the big screen to get more male arse into a movie than has ever been displayed outside of gay porn?

“Yeah. That was definitely one of our objectives,” confirms Johnny. “A lot of movies seem to objectify women, so it’s always been an ambition of ours to objectify men as much as possible, and this movie’s got a whole lot of man-ass to help with that cause.”

It’s a noble, if misguided sentiment, or it would be if Bam Margera didn’t choose this precise moment to hold aloft a spectacularly spread-eagled pussy pic. Ever wondered what it would feel like to gatecrash the biggest, dumbest stag party on the planet? I’m there.

“You’re lucky it was just man-ass. It’s really tough keeping those g-strings on Pontius,” claims the director, Jeff Tremaine.

While we’re on the subject of ‘man-ass’, did Ryan Dunn need assistance with the final tug required to remove the toy-car from his rectum?

“Well, he had it in a condom as you know,” says Tremaine, “and the end of the condom was actually sticking out of his butt the whole time, so he just reached and grabbed it, and the car came right out. It was a bloodless procedure. You can see it actually at the end of the reel – this shitty condom getting thrown away on the floor. He didn’t need help. Thankfully.”

“Let’s just say it wasn’t Ryan Dunne’s first rodeo,” chips in Knoxville.

A total FAQ I know, but what’s the most pain that thay’ve endured for their art?

“Don’t say art,” pleads Tremaine. “When you say art that kind of confuses us. Actually, in the movie I perform the most dangerous stunt in the entire thing, even though normally I try not to be on camera. I had to give Steve-O this tattoo in the back of a truck, and his blood was getting everywhere, including on me. Now Steve-O’s blood is probably the most dangerous substance on this planet. It’s not good, you know?”

“I really don’t know what’s my worst as pain goes,” says Knoxville. “Put it this way, I’ve had a lot of bruises. Hell, I’ve had worse than bruises, but I’d have to go with the bruise that my liver has acquired on this tour of Europe. Especially here in Dublin. When do you start drinking here anyway? I couldn’t keep up.”

Margera is a bit more certain – “I know mine, ’cos I got a broken rib and a pulled hamstring before we started doing the movie, so the most pain I ever had to go through was the entire shoot, because that shit hurted the whole time.”

Aside from the issue of pain, do they have personal and collective limits – is there shit that they just won’t do?

“Well, whenever anything is too gross then we just get Steve-O to do it,” explains Tremaine. “So the really surprising thing about doing the movie was that he turned down the toy car ’cos of his dad. To me that makes it my favourite thing – something that Steve-O wouldn’t do – though I don’t get it, what the big deal was. If I saw my son drinking wine out of another dude’s ass crack I’d be way more bummed than seeing him put a little toy car up there.”

“After the movie, I’d have to say that Ryan is worse than Steve-O,” adds Margera. “I’ve said that he’d throw himself on a grenade for the betterment of the movie, and it’s true.”

Despite all the warnings on the TV show – that submissions will not be entertained – they surely must get a lot of approaches from cutters and other assorted members of the retard fraternity?

“Oh yeah,” sighs Knoxville. “Well, like you said, we do warn people that we won’t watch their videos, so we literally hand them straight back if they approach us with tapes in person. We do get them though. I was at this bar recently and this one guy was nailing his dick against the table hoping that he would be in Jackass. It was Valentine’s Day and his girlfriend left him after it too.”

Aside from this kind of touching incident, the other sort of moron they face comes in the guise of idiotic litigation of the ‘I stuck my pet rat up my ass ’cos I saw it on Jackass variety’, as Knoxville explains.

“We’re being sued by this guy in Montana at the minute for ten million dollars. His name is Jack Ass – seriously, he changed his name – and he said that our movie has ruined his good name.”

“I think that Michael Jackson is claiming that he got the idea for dangling a baby out a window from us,” adds Dave England. “Maybe he should sue.”

And finally, are they winding up the show because they want to end on a high note, or is it purely because they’ve exhausted the variety of scrotal and testicular injuries that they can inflict on one another?

“No, we haven’t run out of those,” claims Knoxville, while the rest of the gang roll around the floor repeating the word ‘scrotum’ in a Beavis and Butthead-like fit of giggling. “We did want to end the show while we still liked it. But like you see at the end of the movie, we really would like to do something in 2063 when we’re decrepit old men.”

As I make my exit, leaving the boys to get back to their undoubtedly enthralling ‘guess the food behind Bam’s outburst of flatulence’ game, I decide that next time – even if it is in sixty years – I’ll go with the cattle prod and the tranquiliser gun. They’ll almost certainly get off on both.