Last year, Johnny Knoxville suffered a brain haemorrhage after taking on a bull and losing. The stunt also earned him a broken wrist and ribs, plus an awful lot of pain when the animal launched him off his feet and flipped him upside down. Bones were a familiar mischief. The brain damage was a new one.
“My cognitive abilities were in steep decline after that hit,” he told US DJ Howard Stern. “I remember taking some tests. The neurosurgeon said, ‘Do you have trouble paying attention right now?’ I said, ‘Yeah, why?’ He goes, ‘Because you scored a 17 on [the attention test]. That’s out of 100.’”
This was literally not Knoxville’s first rodeo – “[that] was the worst hit I’ve ever taken from a bull” he shrugged to Stern – and the injury, sustained during the filming of Jackass Forever, the first “proper” output from Knoxville’s circus of madness in a decade, out this Friday, was just another item on the bill for his success.
Last time out, he almost obliterated his penis in a motorcycle accident. One time, the results of a knock to the head meant that when he blew his nose his eye started coming out of its socket. The day he tried to jump the Los Angeles River on rollerskates, he went home one broken ankle richer. This is why the show opened with an unambiguous warning not to try this at home. Another message stated that submissions of viewers doing their own stunts wouldn’t be viewed or even opened. But it didn’t stop people trying.
And why not? Jackass was a lit-fart of a lightning bolt across culture. When it first aired on MTV in 2000 – in which Knoxville’s introduction to the world was via a stunt called “Poo Cocktail”, where he stood inside an overflowing portable toilet, which was then tipped over by, ahem, a dump truck – it was a fiendishly simple revolution. Using the stylish, fast-cut filmmaking of skateboard movies, the wince factor of America’s Funniest Home Videos, and the whip-sharp wit of Saturday Night Live, the show, along with most of the cast’s bones, was a smash. When they made their first movie in 2002, the budget was $5 million. It grossed almost 20 times that.
