Happy Birthday, America! from Jackass: Best and Last (Paramount)

A deep, creaking, warping groan. An echoing, bellowing thump. A sickening, spewing splash. This trio of sounds is some of the funniest I’ve ever heard. The source? A badly-in-need-of-a-pump Porta John, absurdly strung between two towering cranes, flung precariously 150 feet into the air like a norovirus fever dream version of a Six Flags Sling Shot catapult. Strapped inside the loo is gravel-voiced, gleaming Max Headroom-teethed, whippet menace turned Cali health nut Steve-O, whose only protection against the swelling high tide of Mr. John slop is a pinching nose guard, a helmet, and safety glasses. These mitigation efforts, however, were not enough (amusingly, it’s not this stunt that led Steve-O to cry, “Why do I have to be Steve-O?” but a tee-ball whack to the nuts). A slurry brown swell washes over him on every bungee bounce, hence the sludgy stew that yacks onto the grass below on descent, causing both Steve-O and his buddy below, Bam Margera, to puke (an involuntary yet poor choice for Steve, who gets a shower of his own yuck). As horrifying as his poopy plight is from the camera wedged inside the john, it’s the aforementioned trinity of sounds that got me when rewatching this stunt in the newly released theatrical send-off for that notorious giggling gaggle of idiots (I say this with love), Jackass: Best and Last. With each splish, my theater erupted into laughter, squeals of disgust, and roars of revulsion. A truly sublime and sickening symphony for the demented forever.

Now, these stomach-churning noises and the sketch, appropriately named “Poo Cocktail Supreme,” were not new to me. I had seen it all before, also in the theater, as a part of 2010’s Jackass 3D. But no matter. Beyond the Jackass-ian combo of nausea and delight, I also experienced an overwhelming wave of nostalgia, much like the wave of human waste crashing over Steve. I recalled not only falling out when seeing it for the first time as a grad student, but my entire Jackass journey, dating back to those early aughts when I revered their antics in high school. So much so that when I wasn’t wearing a Korn T-shirt, I sported a shirt emblazoned with a baby crocodile clenching ringleader Johnny Knoxville’s nipple in its jaws, a shirt I am appalled I still don’t own today. Yes, I’m fucking old. And so are silver fox Knoxville and his a bit weathered friends. More than back-in-my-day dusty millennial romanticism, Jackass: Best and Last reminded me just how formative this cackling kamikaze crew was to, well, the whole outlook I’ve tried to promote on this website, namely an adoration of American trash (there is a reason John Waters appeared in a Jackass film AND Knoxville sports one of Wacky Wacko’s John Waters tees in Best and Last). In fact, it was this line in a New York Times review of Jackass 2, which lived on my Facebook profile page for years before Zuckerberg’s aging app became a radicalization tool for QAnon boomers, that may just have made me a critic: “You may prefer a Buster Keaton gag to the spectacle of a man leaping from a trampoline into a ceiling fan, but you can’t argue with its purity.” No, you certainly can’t!

If plucking at the heartstrings of 40-somethings with sore joints whose sense of humor never matured past the slapstick magnificence of grown men dropping like a stiff board after being slapped with a giant papier-mache hand was the intended effect of this one last Jackass flick, then it was a rousing success. And I assume sparking wistfulness was deliberate, given Knoxville’s ever-present tearfulness throughout the film. Or maybe that’s just the residual effect of the second-take traumatic brain injury that ended his life’s passion: being launched into the air by bulls. Either way, Knoxville’s mistiness starts early in the studio parking lot when he admits with a tremor in his voice that he’s sad about their last ride. Chris Pontius, otherwise known as the ass-shaking, thong-wearing Party Boy, denies sharing Knoxville’s feelings because, “I’m not in touch with my emotions.” A low, rumbling chortle. This parking lot convo was one of a few framing scenes contextualizing the strange but not unwelcome flow of Best and Last, a mash-up of best-of clips from the original MTV show and subsequent films; unseen and unaired footage, including one stunt left in the bin due to miffed law enforcement and a subsequent ban from filming in West Hollywood (the cops were likely steamed because one was so frantic to get to the scene of the (faux) crime she forgot to put her drifting squad car in park); and new bits, all clearly filmed over a few days on a studio lot.

Poopies gets new lips (Paramount)

This new footage is no less outrageous than the classics. Take the introduction of recent Jackass hire, Larry, one of those faceless robots frequently seen tripping over their own feet while dancing or falling on Cardi B in viral videos, who seems to have experienced a career change. In yet another example of automation taking jobs, Larry puts doctors out of business by giving Steve-O a probing prostate exam with his thick mechanical fingers bulging with prominent, sharp rectal tissue-tearing knuckle joints. Don’t worry. Larry uses lube. In this case, peanut butter. Crunchy. Larry’s wayward, imprecise anal jabbing and hurl-inducing peanut butter smearing, coupled with Steve-O’s ever-familiar wails, made me cry laughing. The tears kept flowing straight through an oldie but goodie: Knoxville, Danger Ehren, and Dave England snickering in the woods while blasting airhorns at unsuspecting golfers. The bot prostate exam isn’t the only time the greying Jackass crew plays on their own aging. Another involves guzzling the liquid laxative taken before a colonoscopy before playing a hazardous and eventually very slippery game of Twister, a gross-out gag so revolting that the guy next to me coughed like he was about to projectile vomit. Better than applause!

Similar to 2022’s Jackass Forever, the fresh stunts feature a ragtag group of newbies, all of whom seem game for just about anything. Yet, as much as I appreciate Jasper Dolphin’s good-natured response to getting repeatedly rammed by a racist ram, only one of these youngsters boasts the ideal mix of maniacal masochism, desperate camera-hungry showmanship, and groaning reticence that defines the originals: a star by the name of Poopies. Although whining all the while, Poopies still gets his lips overfilled à la Lisa Rinna, a pouty sight gag that spans the film and never gets old, and dons a zapping dick shock collar while attempting to teeter on a balance beam made out of scrap wood and other junk posed precariously on the edge of a cliff. Like the latter, electrocution is a favored method of torture in Best and Last, a realization I had while standing in front of Andy Warhol’s electric chair portrait, Orange Disaster #5, at the Guggenheim Pop exhibition and reminiscing about the gang strapping Danger Ehren to one at the conclusion of an even more sadistic take on an escape room. Obviously, all great American artists—Warhol and Jackass—understand the electric chair’s importance as the seminal symbol of crazed American malice!

One last Jackass ride (Paramount)

With the wide range of something old, something new, and something so spectacularly dodgy it lingered in the can for decades so moronic fans didn’t also tape their friends in a cardboard box and shove it down the stairs, Best and Last reveals that what actually make a phenomenal Jackass bit typically falls into one of three categories, starting with the first, an IRL version of violent Looney Tunes cartoon injuries. Think Johnny Knoxville climbing onto a big red rocket ready to be blasted to the moon like a Chuck Taylors-wearing Wiley Coyote, or, simpler but no less effective, Steve-O leaping on a rake. All that was missing from the latter was a circle of animated birds swirling around his noggin. The second—and my personal fav—consists of exceedingly stupid shit bored teens did, and likely still do, even with the grodiest porn imaginable a couple clicks away, with their friends. This is why the image of the Jackass crew riding a gigantic shopping cart, rekindled here in a final explosive hurrah, is so iconic, an upsized, heroic version of the antics currently annoying Walmart workers in parking lots across this fine nation. And last but not least, superb Jackass stunts require ideas that are so perilously idiotic that nobody but the criminally insane would dare attempt, whether late star Ryan Dunn shoving a toy car up his ass and waddling into an emergency clinic or Wee-Man bungee jumping from a bridge while attached to hefty Preston Lacy. Perhaps the most memorable footage in Best and Last falls into this last category: a pre-Jackass, late 1990s Knoxville shooting himself in the stomach point-blank with a pistol, only protected by a bulletproof vest stuffed with porn magazines, an act so unhinged that it could have leaped straight out of the overheated minds of the juvenile delinquents in a John Waters film.

What connects all of these stunts is that they are deeply, unmistakably, foolishly American. No other citizens would be this delightfully and deliriously stupid! Hell, Knoxville introduces himself in that pre-millennium footage with “I’m Johnny Knoxville. United States of America!” He’s right to invoke our great nation. Is there anything more American than turning the gun on yourself while safeguarded with a copy of Penthouse? Or blasting out of a manhole in a devil costume with a sign that says, “Keep God out of California”? Or kidnapping Brad Pitt? Or terrorizing your snake-phobic pal with a rattler? Or strapping yourself to a rocket, while wearing an American flag helmet, just because you can?  The Jackass kids…or middle-aged adults…are not the only Americans who have tried. “Mad” Mike Hughes gave his life attempting a similar feat to prove the Earth was, in fact, flat! USA USA USA!! While I’ve often cribbed John Waters’s quote about loving everything bad about America, I love everything good about it too, and Jackass may represent the promise of the United States at its best. The inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of extreme gonzo antics, suicidal stupidity, and gauche trash misbehavior! Just as the Founding Fathers intended! And if you get CTE along the way, it was well worth it for that adrenaline rush of barely escaping calamity and, of course, the laughs with your buddies, a joy that Jackass always graciously shares with its audience. As the frequent Jackass needle-drop goes, “If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough,” which should really replace “in God we trust” on our currency. Why, it makes me feel downright patriotic. Happy 250th, America!