Johnny Knoxville, America’s God of Mischief
Johnny Knoxville doesn’t keep track of how many bones he’s broken. When asked for a number earlier this summer, he balked. The notion of accounting struck Knoxville, the star and co-creator of the “Jackass” franchise, as silly. “Double digits,” he told me after a long pause. “My ankles three times apiece. Arms. Hands. Elbows. A lot.”
It was a load-bearing unit, that “a lot.” Knoxville’s other workplace injuries include a urethral tear, an orbital fracture resulting in globe luxation—in layman’s terms, the partial popping out of his eyeball—herniated disks, lacerations, burns, and sixteen concussions. Only two of the original “Jackass” cast members remain in full possession of their own teeth, and Knoxville is not one of them.
The three TV seasons, five films, and plentiful offshoots that make up the global “Jackass” juggernaut share a no-frills format. In them, men (and, later, one woman) perform stunts and pranks. Some of the segments are one-liners promoted to three dimensions: a man farts into a trumpet, a man pole-vaults into a palm tree. Some make fanciful use of mousetraps, barrels, explosives, slingshots, stilts, toilets, tightropes, and other classic comedy props. There are gross-out gags (“Sweatsuit Cocktail,” “Butt Piercing”) and a tremendous amount of peniswork. Some stunts speak the universal language of physical comedy with a math-like elegance: a man dressed in a Velcro suit skateboards up a ramp and splats against the side of a passing truck that is also coated in Velcro, and, truckside, the man is conveyed offscreen. Nabokov’s definition of humor as a “loss of balance—and appreciation of losing it” summarizes “Jackass” ’s spirit and mechanics.
“Jackass” wouldn’t work without its lovable ensemble cast, but Knoxville is the obvious ringleader. When you watch him crash into a fruit cart or electrocute his friends, it is tempting to think of him as a minor god sent down from Olympus for the amusement of higher entities—an emissary of mischief loosed upon mortals who are powerless to resist or understand him. “Get a load of this,” you imagine Zeus saying as Knoxville Jet Skis through a garden hedge.
The star is famous for his laugh, which sounds like friendly fire, and for his face, which is remarkably handsome. But mostly he is famous for risking his life more often and more mirthfully than any of his peers. For the sake of the footage, Knoxville has been charged by a herd of buffalo while on roller skates, attacked by multiple bulls, flipped by a yak, shot from a cannon, strapped to a rocket, and knocked out by a heavyweight boxer. “Jackass” has inspired not only imitative TV shows and YouTube stars—Mr. Beast, the brothers Paul—but whole categories of the internet, including D.I.Y. prank content, challenge videos, and fail compilations.
Within the small group of professionals—football players, stuntmen, M.M.A. fighters—paid to destroy their bodies for mass entertainment, Knoxville, at fifty-five, has proved preposterously durable. Filming on the fifth and allegedly final film, “Jackass: Best and Last,” wrapped in February, twenty-six years after the franchise premièred. That gives Knoxville a solid decade on Evel Knievel, and far more time than the average prizefighter.
For the past few years, he has rented a home in the Valley. His neighborhood has a suburban sense of self-control, with houses crouched behind tidy yards of drought-resistant flora. There are no sweeping views, no architectural triumphs. It is a neighborhood you’d sooner associate with a prosperous dentist than with a movie star. On a sunny weekday, Knoxville emerged from his home in bubblegum-pink board shorts and with omnidirectional silver hair, his face lacquered in sunblock. We planned to go for a surf.
The first south swell of the season had arrived and would soon climax in barrelling eight-foot waves along Southern California’s coast. Knoxville, who is not an experienced surfer, was unflapped by the forecast. He slid into the driver’s seat of a Chevy Tahoe and applied a pair of sunglasses. “Let’s make some mistakes,” he said, peeling out.
He headed west, up and over Malibu’s humped green hills. As we descended toward the Pacific, the air and terrain grew salty. Parking lots overflowed. The first day of a seasonal swell is always a frenzied event, and we watched surfers sprint seaward as though gold had been discovered offshore. Point Dume, where Knoxville parked, is an enclave that managed to retain some of its beachside funk up through the nineteen-nineties. Now it is a place where Kamala Harris and Sergey Brin own houses.
“I surf like a crippled gorilla,” Knoxville warned me on the sand as he zipped into a thick wetsuit. We watched a surfer drop into a wave and carve expert lines, smacking the lip to throw a jet of spray into his friend’s face. (Hopefully his friend.) Knoxville climbed onto his board and paddled out, pausing halfway to untangle a kelp ribbon from his leash. Upon reaching the lineup, he sat upright. “I didn’t think I was gonna make it!” he said.
While resting his arms, Knoxville commented appreciatively on the weather and the view of sandstone cliffs. He seemed pleased to be in the sun, pleased to be in the water, pleased to pee in his wetsuit. Occasionally, he zoned out, gazing far into the distance and dropping out of conversation. “Sorry,” he said after one zone-out. “Sometimes I go to Tijuana for a moment.”
When a set rolled in, Knoxville aimed unhesitatingly for a hefty wave. He windmilled past the surfer we’d admired from shore, who backed away in fear of carnage. The wave pitched. Knoxville popped up and flew a hundred yards toward the beach, as easy as a kid on a zipline. At the end of the ride, he dismounted, turned, and got creamed by an even heftier wave. His board shot skyward and vanished into a gyre of foam. His silvery head was lost in a tumble. All went quiet as the wave expended itself toward the shallows, and then the hush was broken by a hoot.
Those who know him best are baffled by Knoxville’s—well, nobody agrees on what to call it. Daredevilry? Foolishness? Insanity? Compulsion? Damage? Courage? Masochism? “I don’t know exactly how to describe it,” Spike Jonze, who has produced every installment of “Jackass,” said. “It doesn’t come from outside. It’s an inner quality.” Knoxville’s cousin Roger Alan Wade, who has known him longer than most people alive, was equally stumped: “He’s got a golden heart and a soul to match. The great mystery is what’s going round and round inside that carnival brain.”
Knoxville’s whatever-it-is topples the logic of moviemaking itself. Bankable leading men are not meant to imperil their lives by performing unrehearsed death-defying stunts. Medics on “Jackass” sets are instructed to hold back as much as possible, to avoid ruining good footage. “You’re supposed to insure the leading man in a Hollywood feature film, keep him intact,” the cast member Stephen Glover, alias Steve-O, said. “It makes no sense.”
It made no sense to Knoxville’s family and friends after the first broken bone, and they’re no closer to understanding it now. He has won fame and fortune and critical acclaim for his stunts, but he might have finagled those things without sustaining quite so many traumatic brain injuries in the process. He has three children, a wife, and an extended family whom he loves. Nobody forced him to get in the bullring or turn a gun on himself. So why does he do it? What makes Johnny run?
For clues, it’s best to begin with his Tennessee home town, from which he lifted his stage name. Born Philip John Clapp in 1971, Knoxville has unmistakable Southern origins. He has lived in Los Angeles long enough to have dropped “sir” and “ma’am” from his sentences, but the honorifics are still implied. Doors are held open, “please”s and “thank you”s delivered promptly. He is polite to the point of inefficiency, seeing to it that everyone within reach is comfortable and hydrated and has a ride to wherever they are headed next.
Knoxville’s parents, Phil Clapp and Lemoyne Houck Clapp, attended rival high schools in Knoxville. Phil was a star athlete and a ham. Lemoyne was movie-star beautiful and made sure everyone knew it. The family lived in a split-level house with a double carport. There were woods in the back, rosebushes in the front, and a pony named Bo Diddley in the yard. Phil ran a tire company that he’d inherited from his father. Lemoyne baked black-bottom pies and managed the household. The neighborhood was close-knit; when Bo Diddley escaped his pen, the whole block fanned out to track him down.
Knoxville is the baby of the family, born seven and ten years, respectively, after his older sisters, Krisden and Lynne. It was an unplanned pregnancy. As an infant, Knoxville was voluptuously plump. At mealtimes, he ate so rapidly that it took a pit crew of Clapp females to refill the boy’s Infa Feeder with purée. Other than feeding Bo Diddley, Knoxville was exempt from chores. “He never mowed the yard,” Lynne said. “We babied him real bad.” To spare their brother the trouble of walking, the girls carried him from place to place. When he was threatened with a spanking, they hid him from the parental hand. “It was like having a pet monkey,” Wade, Knoxville’s cousin, said. “All they needed was an organ-grinder.”
Knoxville made trouble as soon as he could walk. If Lynne went to get her hair done at the beauty parlor, Knoxville might aim a water balloon at the fresh coif. If she had a date over to the house, he’d yank his underwear up like a sumo wrestler and streak through the den. None of this ruffled his mother. “P.J. could’ve killed the Pope and my mama would say, ‘Pope deserved it,’ ” Lynne told me.
As long as the girls could remember, Knoxville was in and out of the hospital for asthma. Lemoyne kept a hawk eye on his breathing: her son would go quiet when he felt his airways narrowing. Several times a year, the family rushed him to the hospital mid-attack for an adrenaline injection. “Oh, my God!” Knoxville said, when asked about those visits. “I’ve done a lot of drugs in my time, and I’ve never had a rush like that.” Adrenaline, he said, was like “sniffing an eight ball of cocaine all at once.” He liked it very much.
Better than adrenaline was the feeling that followed. Later in life, Knoxville read about a set of experiments conducted by the Air Force researcher John Stapp, who was assigned to test how much force a body could withstand when ejected from a plane. Stapp had buckled himself into a rocket-powered sled and accelerated to more than six hundred miles per hour before slamming to a stop. In the hospital, he experienced what he called “survival euphoria.” Strangely enough, Stapp did not describe it as a sense of joy or relief. Instead, it drenched him in a hunger for greater risk. When Knoxville read about Stapp, he thought back to his childhood asthma attacks and oxygen masks and the adrenaline shots that pinned him to the wall before bringing back his breath, and how all of that compared to the post-stunt rush. Yeah, that’s it, he thought. Survival euphoria.
A love of attention and a taste for adrenaline: two suggestive ingredients. To this brew, add Knoxville’s father. “Trace it back to Phil,” Wade said. “He was the genuine, authentic, original jackass.” Phil ran his tire company as a merger of successful business and amateur circus. His associates had names like Ass-Kickin’ Robert, Big George, Boxcar, and Super Dick. When he wasn’t feeding the men milkshakes spiked with Ex-Lax or mailing fake I.R.S. audit letters to their homes, Phil amused himself with antics like the Mongoose Box: a contraption installed in his company’s showroom with a sign reading “MONGOOSE: DO NOT TOUCH.” “He put a rope around the box and said, ‘Nobody go near. It’s dangerous!’ ” Krisden told me. “Which of course only drew more attention to it.” When customers got close to the box, Phil flipped a switch that ejected a spring-loaded stuffed animal. “People would jump out of their skin,” Krisden said. “I have no idea where he got the ideas in his head.”
At home, Phil liked to fling open the bathroom door and hurl a cup of ice water over the top of the shower onto his son. “That was an everyday thing,” Lynne said. If Lemoyne had a P.T.A. meeting to attend, Phil might dress up as a drifter, wander into the meeting, and pinch his wife on the bum. He flew planes and staged gunfights with blank cartridges. “When it came to pure street smarts, I’ve never seen anyone who could hold a candle to it,” Wade told me. “If he’d applied it to science, we’d be living on Mars. But he applied it to pranks.” The way the world sees Knoxville today is exactly how a tiny corner of Tennessee once looked at Phil Clapp.
Same as anyone’s childhood, there were good scenes and bad scenes. Phil was a drinker. He got loud, fought with Lemoyne, scared the children. “I was constantly feeling small and bullied,” Knoxville said. Phil drove his son out to Los Angeles twice. The first time went fine. The second time, Phil was off the wagon. When they arrived in Arcadia, Knoxville watched his father pour a big glass half full of vodka, half full of water. “He took it with both hands like a little kid and just killed it,” Knoxville said. “It broke my heart. He needed it so bad.”
Phil died in 2018. When I first got in touch with Knoxville about writing a profile, he sent an e-mail full of old family photos: Phil suited and exultant on his wedding day, Phil laughing with baby Knoxville on his lap, Phil and son in matching pastel-blue outfits. The final photo shows Phil reclining in a La-Z-Boy beneath a light-up Christmas-tree trinket. Knoxville, then well into his twenties, sits on his father’s lap. Both are beaming. “Me and my ol’ man,” he wrote as a caption. “I loved him so much and miss him dearly.”
One last scene from childhood. To pass the time on hot summer days, Knoxville and a friend invented a game called Nutball. The rules were simple. Three to five children stripped to their undies and sat wide-legged in a circle on the floor, hurling billiard balls at one another’s crotches. They could do this for hours. Some children fly kites, some children feed ducks, some children court genital trauma. By the time Knoxville moved to Los Angeles, in 1990, a successor to the Nutball gang was in its early stages.
If the descendants of “Jackass” are legion, the franchise itself has a single, unambiguous origin: a skateboarding magazine called Big Brother. Steve Rocco, the magazine’s founder, is a California native who owned the successful skate company World Industries. In 1992, Rocco hired Jeff Tremaine, a young art-school graduate (and later the director of “Jackass”), as the editor. Spike Jonze, a childhood friend of Tremaine’s (and a producer of “Jackass”), contributed photos. The magazine’s writers included Sean Cliver (another producer) and Chris Pontius (a cast member); it featured skaters like Jason (Wee Man) Acuña (cast member) and lunatics like Steve-O (cast member).
Big Brother was fashioned as an anarchic alternative to more established skate magazines like Thrasher and TransWorld, which Rocco deplored for their earnestness. The magazine’s office, in El Segundo, was patched together from two-by-fours, sheet metal, and chicken wire. Where other magazines focussed on the mechanics of skating, Big Brother’s stroke of genius was to consider itself—and here an unfortunate word must be enlisted—a “lifestyle” magazine.
Along with skate photos and interviews, the publication contained boobs, reviews of malt liquor, an account of surviving a Mexican prison, and tutorials on how to manufacture a fake I.D. or build a bong or snort lines of Pixy Stix sugar dust like cocaine. When Tremaine was advised that a magazine’s title ought to be printed in large type for maximum newsstand visibility, he called a printer and inquired about the smallest printable font. The next issue had “Big Brother” hidden in four-point Helvetica on the cover’s upper left-hand corner.
The magazine circulated as samizdat through bedrooms and school cafeterias—a boyosphere flourishing long before the manosphere reared its ugly head. What seemed miraculous to the magazine’s readership was the result of a traditional formula for creative success: assemble raw talent, shower them in cash, taunt them with an adversary, and remove supervision. Decades before the phrase “parasocial relationship” became shorthand for the psychology of influencing, Big Brother staffers appeared in its pages like recurring sitcom characters. Readers wrote in to extend inside jokes that persisted for years. The “Jackass” cast member Dave England told me that the first time he read the magazine he thought, I wish I knew these guys.
Knoxville had been kicking around Los Angeles a while before he entered the Big Brother orbit. Directly after graduating high school, he enrolled in an eight-week acting program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in Pasadena. His stage experience at the time consisted of two school plays. What made Johnny run West may not have been a love of the stage but a desire for eyeballs, lots of eyeballs, and he seemed to arrive at acting by a process of elimination: a sports injury left him unfit for college baseball, and a tin ear rendered him ineligible for rock stardom. “I knew he wasn’t cut out to live in South Knoxville,” his sister Lynne said. “But I also knew that if he didn’t do something grand he wasn’t gonna have a penny. Because he wasn’t gonna work.”
Knoxville rented a run-down apartment in Hollywood, where he embraced the region’s historic economy of waiting tables, auditioning for commercials, and depositing checks from his mother. There were other odd jobs: hotel bellhop, mover, Little League umpire. A florist paid him to dress up as a pterodactyl and stand on Coldwater Canyon Avenue promoting the business. Knoxville was fired after forty-five minutes for humping a phone booth in the costume.
He met Tremaine on the set of a music video. Although Knoxville didn’t skate, he saw in Big Brother a crew of adventurers whose inclinations overlapped with his own. The type of skating featured in the magazine required obsessive repetition, a demonic pain threshold, and a pirate’s eye for identifying the types of public and private property best suited for plundering. You couldn’t have engineered a better candidate pool for Knoxville’s future gang, a better training camp for his cast.
But it was more than that. Skating habituates a person to failure. The quantity of trial and error necessary to land a trick is enormous—a person might try and fail a hundred times—and it usually occurs before a pitiless jury of one’s peers. How, in these circumstances, could anyone not develop a Zen-like sense of proportion around defeat? The mind-set translated seamlessly to “Jackass,” where the biggest wipeout draws the biggest laugh.
Knoxville pitched a story to Big Brother about testing self-defense equipment, including a can of pepper spray, a stun gun, a Taser, and a bulletproof vest. The test subject would be the author. “Film it,” Tremaine told Knoxville. The resulting tape shows a young man screaming on the ground after a blast of pepper spray, collapsing by force of Taser, writhing under a hundred and twenty thousand volts of stun gun. It sounds like footage that might be featured on a “60 Minutes” special about a crisis of risk-taking behavior in youth. But the Knoxville who appears onscreen—twenty-seven years old, forged of rubber and courage, wrapped in an American flag as a cape—is proof that charisma can enchant anything in its path. Yet another symmetry with skateboarding: “You can do the hardest trick, but if it looks robotic nobody wants to see it,” Bam Margera, a cast member, told me. “You want to look like you’re not burning calories. Like you’re floating with no care in the world. Buttery, effortless, simple.”
Knoxville’s hardest trick involved the bulletproof vest, which he planned to strap on and test by coaxing a friend to shoot him with a .38-calibre Smith & Wesson. The shooter backed out at the last minute, not wanting to implicate himself in a possible murder. The videographer also backed out, not wanting to implicate himself in a possible snuff film—but not before Knoxville persuaded him to prop the camera on a surface and train it in the right direction. For extra protection, he stuffed a few porn mags under his Kevlar vest—two copies of Hustler, two copies of Leg World—then shot himself in the stomach. The tape shows him rearing back, catching himself from falling, and jumping into a getaway car. A powder burn is singed into his T-shirt. When Tremaine saw the footage, he called Spike Jonze. “I think there’s a TV show in here,” he said.
“Jackass” débuted on MTV in 2000. Knoxville’s cast was drawn almost entirely from skateboarding, and the cheap-and-fast aesthetic of the show was imported wholesale from skate videos. “People like us could film what boys have been doing since the dawn of time,” Dave Carnie, an editor at Big Brother, said. “You know that Henry VIII, as a boy, was doing ‘Jackass’ shit. He just didn’t have a camcorder.” It was possible, Carnie said, to posit a crude material explanation for the genesis of the show: “We were dumb kids with new toys.”
The show was a quick hit and a quick flashpoint. A few months after it premièred, a thirteen-year-old boy in Connecticut lit himself on fire in an apparent imitation of a sketch. At least two other copycat incidents followed. Senator Joe Lieberman, who was on a tear about violence in the media, prevailed upon MTV to cancel or reform the show. The network issued a statement disclaiming responsibility but noting that “obviously we feel horrible when a young person does something to hurt themselves”—then proceeded to produce another season of a show in which young people did always and only that.
MTV brought on a safety supervisor to review stunt ideas. “This guy was trying to apply run-of-the-mill workplace OSHA standards to anything and everything we wanted to do,” Sean Cliver, a producer, said. There were tussles over stunts like “Poo Diaper,” in which Dave England, dressed in raggedy clothes, approaches a public trash can, digs around, retrieves a soiled diaper, and eats its contents. (The diaper had been pre-filled with chocolate pudding.) MTV strongly objected to “Poo Diaper.” Inevitably, the show’s spectacular success had drawn eyeballs of the wrong kind. It seemed to Knoxville that the network suddenly had a lot of tedious opinions about the location of lines (everywhere) and the advisability of crossing them (almost never). After three seasons, he quit. The show was no longer fun, and he had bigger aspirations.
“Jackass: The Movie” was released in 2002 and grossed eighty million dollars worldwide. The third film, “Jackass: 3D,” doubled that figure. Because “OW!” is roughly the same in every language, bits like “Lamborghini Tooth Pull” and “The Bungee Wedgie” and “Anaconda Ball Pit” and “Ass Kicked by Girl” and “Beehive Tetherball” transmitted laglessly across the globe. Each segment might have been subtitled “The Joy of Boys.” The spectacle of play was intoxicating. “Play cannot be denied,” the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga once wrote. “You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” The gang went on tour, launched spinoffs, and rejoiced in the genesis of a novel female organism: the “Jackass” groupie.
Boys need fuel, of course. Along with cheeseburgers and beer—Miller High Life sponsored the first two movies—the cast gobbled mountains of drugs. “Jackass: The Movie” was (unofficially) underwritten by analgesics. “We loved pain pills,” Knoxville said, adding that a rough encounter with a morphine lollipop eventually led him to a rule of never going beyond Vicodin. Success called for accelerants. “Adderall drove the second and third films,” Knoxville said. “We were highly focussed!” I observed that most of the cast would seem medically eligible for Adderall, anyway. “Everyone’s got something,” Knoxville said. “You don’t get footage like that without people having something.”
The “Jackass” films don’t aspire to the level of art, but they possess art’s ability to change the way a person sees the world. Even if only for an hour after exiting the theatre, familiar landscapes sparkle with objects that might be toppled or ignited or thrown down a staircase. Suburban malls, city intersections, country roads: everything becomes a field of unexploded comic ordnance.
On a Thursday afternoon, Knoxville was scheduled to go straight from a podcast interview to “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” To ready himself for prime time, Knoxville had placed a dab of pomade in his hair and spoken on the phone with a producer for a few minutes. No other preparation was needed.
Though he beat a straight path to fame, Knoxville bears no trace of the administrative neediness that afflicts many celebrities—the constant requests for a bottle of water, a phone charger, a vape, an iced coffee, a reminder of what time it is. He replies to texts. He remembers birthdays. If Knoxville’s “Jackass” presence has the kind of detonative propulsion more typically observed in cephalopods and volcanoes than in human men, his private presence is reserved. What does he have to prove?
When the podcast wrapped, Knoxville left the recording studio and slid into his 1970 Cadillac Eldorado, which sat in a parking lot sucking heat into its black interior. He turned the key. The Cadillac vibrated like a cat on a warm lap. There were ashtrays built into the armrests and a console-mounted eight-track.
Even in Hollywood, a vintage Cadillac is an attention-grabbing vehicle. Halfway to “Kimmel,” a cop car glued itself to our tail. “We’re being followed,” Knoxville said—and then, under his breath, “It’s because I’m driving weird.” The cruiser eased up alongside us. When the officer saw who was behind the wheel, he flashed a peace sign and moved on. Here is one way to measure a celebrity’s approval rating: by whether an officer of the law is more or less likely to issue a ticket after clocking the driver’s identity.
At the lot, “Kimmel” staffers in black suits showed Knoxville into an alley bookended by chain-link fences. Autograph seekers crested and frothed over the barriers, teetering on ladders they’d dragged from home. “It’s the same guys every time,” a security guard told me. “They sell the autographs to whomever.”
Happy to abet the hustle, Knoxville signed posters until a producer came out and corralled him inside.
“There’s a raccoon loose in the building,” the producer told him.
“Oh, boy!” Knoxville said.
Discussion of the at-large raccoon continued into the greenroom, where a scented candle with a moody odor flickered on a side table. The producer sat down to review the run of show. Did Knoxville like the idea of doing something around the raccoon? He did. What if Knoxville came onstage holding a fake raccoon by the tail, claiming to have caught the bastard? Great!
Knoxville is friendly with Kimmel and has appeared on the show twenty-one times. As people cycled in and out of the greenroom, one woman confessed that, despite knowing Knoxville for years, she still wasn’t sure what to call him. Was it P.J.? Or Johnny? Or should she stick to Knoxville?
This is a widespread area of uncertainty. “I remember going through the entirety of shooting ‘Jackass Forever’ not knowing what to call him,” Emily Ting, his wife, said. (Ting worked as a costume designer on the last two films.) It doesn’t help that he signs e-mails, and sometimes texts, with “Señor Tango” or “Puddin’ ” or “the South Knoxville Strong Boy” or “Abraham Lincoln Jenkins” or “Edward James Almost.” Because fame exempts Knoxville from the standard rite of a formal introduction, a surprising number of people in his orbit resort to evasion. (“Hey, man/amigo/buddy.”) For the most recent film, Ting landed on a policy of calling her husband P.J. at home and Knoxville at work.
When the taping began, everyone migrated to a holding pen with a bar and tasteful arrangements of cacti. Knoxville got a whiskey and watched from a monitor. A fake raccoon zoomed around Kimmel’s stage in a tiny car full of walnuts.
When summoned by the producer, Knoxville presented himself to Ting for final outfit approval, then left. He reappeared seconds later on the monitor, holding the raccoon. “I caught him,” he told Kimmel, dangling the prop animal. “He’s not dead. He just got into my whiskey backstage. Let him sleep it off.”
The bit worked. Watching Knoxville enter performance mode was like watching a glass of still water become carbonated. Same flavor, but tingly.
After “Kimmel” wrapped, Knoxville got back in the Cadillac and drove to In-N-Out for a snack. He nosed the car into the drive-through line, drawing stares as he nosed—some for the vehicle, some for the driver. Mostly male stares. A teen-age boy stepped up to the passenger window and leaned in to take his order.
“One hamburger with tomato, lettuce, and mustard,” Knoxville said. “Fries, please. And a cup of water.”
“Onion?”
“No, sir.”
The teen-ager squinted. “You look familiar. Are you famous, by any chance?”
“Actually, completely by chance!” Knoxville improvised.
“Jackass Forever,” which came out in 2022, was meant to be the final installment. Twelve years had passed since the previous film—an eternity in Hollywood, and in the biological lives of stuntmen. Knoxville wasn’t sure if audiences would care about the high jinks of middle-aged men. But the film was another hit, grossing eighty million dollars worldwide. Instead of the usual I-can’t-believe-they’re-doing-that reaction, audiences reacted with I-can’t-believe-they’re-still-doing-that: a minor but effective update. Midway through filming, Knoxville decided to stop dyeing his hair, which had turned white in his twenties. A visibly wrinkled and graying cast, it turned out, only underlined what “Jackass” had promised all along: that men can be boys at any age.
The film was released in the twilight of the #MeToo movement, when male self-scrutiny was at its most squeamish. As countless books and articles palpated the question of whether it was possible to be an unproblematic man, “Jackass Forever” offered its own (totally unintended) solution to the crisis of masculinity: just don’t become a man. Get off the train at the “boy” stop and proceed no further. Cultural expectations of men change at lightning speed, but boys will be boys will be boys. That’s one reason the “Jackass” movies have aged well—or, rather, have not aged at all. They belong to the world of “What, me worry?” and “Looney Tunes” and the rampaging ding-dongs of Bruegel’s “Children’s Games.”
Though the movies reject machismo, they still revel in punishment. Steve-O described the cast as “attention whores battling for screen time. The more terrible the thing that happens to you, the more likely you’ll make the cut.” You don’t have to be a sociologist to recognize the hazards of this dynamic. If the respect of a person’s peers—not to mention his paycheck and access to SAG health insurance—hangs on his willingness to rupture a testicle with a pogo stick, the notion of “consent” wobbles. The jackasses are friends, accomplices, and rivals. Together, they’ve had fun and made gobs of money and partied their brains out, but they’ve also harmed each other irreparably.
Among the cast it is tacitly acknowledged that Knoxville is the chief instigator of damage. “Even in the most serious of situations,” Sean Cliver said, “Knoxville can’t help himself if he sees an opening.” By “opening,” Cliver meant the opportunity to pitch an object at someone else’s nuts. “We’re all so P.T.S.D.’d from this over the years that we could be standing at a funeral and most everyone would still have one hand cupped over their groin.” Nobody is safe on set. “You gotta keep your wits about you,” Preston Lacy, a cast member, said. “Stay vigilant. Like a fighter pilot.” When I asked Spike Jonze if there was any way to declare oneself off-limits from Knoxville’s sprees, he had to stop and think hard about the question. “Not that I’m aware of,” Jonze finally said. “No, I’m pretty sure there’s not. It’s a little stressful, especially if you’re operating a camera.”
Certain people, Cliver said, have had to “distance themselves” from Knoxville, because “when he sets his mind to a prank there really are no bounds to what he can dream up.” In 2024, a segment producer from a non-“Jackass” show brought a lawsuit alleging that Knoxville had nonconsensually chased him down and Tased him, resulting in a number of injuries. (The case has been settled.) “All play is a voluntary activity,” Huizinga, the historian, wrote. It can only be conducted by choice and in freedom. You can’t compel someone to play, especially with a conducted-energy weapon.
If Knoxville has a sadistic streak, his cruelest target is always himself. “I have treated a boxer, football players, other athletes,” David Kipper, Knoxville’s physician of two decades, told me. “But nothing like him. Knoxville’s injuries are not a consequence of his work. In some ways, they are the purpose of his work.” Of his patient’s many exotic ailments, it was the urethral tear, in 2008, that stood out to the doctor. The injury occurred during a botched motorcycle stunt. “Now, if you’re a guy and you hear the phrase ‘self-catheterization,’ you start crossing your legs,” he said. Knoxville had to catheterize himself multiple times a day for more than three years. “He was so laissez-faire,” Kipper said. “That was pretty manly of him.” He added, “Amazingly, he was still able to make babies after the injury.”
Because daredevilry is not a sport and has no rules, there is no consensus on what might constitute a career-ending injury. Kipper advised Knoxville to hang up the cape in 2022, when his patient suffered a severe concussion and a brain hemorrhage while filming “Jackass Forever.” In the stunt, Knoxville steps into a bullring with a flourish. The bull charges and hits his target, flipping Knoxville roughly five hundred and forty degrees in the air. Those who were present remember it in snapshots: the crack of skull against hard-packed dirt, the crumple of Knoxville’s body, the medics who disregarded their customary order to hover off camera. Knoxville remembers almost nothing.
The months that followed, he said, were a period of “almost sliding off the earth.” Knoxville’s mind turned to guacamole. His speech declined; he avoided friends; his second marriage ended. Trips to Tijuana lasted longer than they should have. He took antidepressants for the first time in his life. “Here’s a dark reality,” Steve-O said. “My father is eighty-three years old, and every time I speak with him I’m searching for any indication that his cognitive awareness has diminished and that dementia is setting in. It’s really dark and messed up that I have those same antennae up in every conversation I have with Knoxville.”
Interviewers occasionally ask Knoxville if he worries about chronic traumatic encephalopathy—or, as the podcaster Dax Shepard put it, “whatever the football thing is.” In these conversations, Knoxville will acknowledge that C.T.E. is an area of concern, and that it cannot yet be diagnosed in a living person. Sometimes he’ll crack a little joke about it, saying, “I didn’t win any awards for my brain scans.”
Dave Carnie told me that “Jackass” was “best appreciated without giving it too much thought.” Knoxville himself excels at selective underthinking. The bull hit was not his first scrap with the animal that day. In an earlier take, the bull had charged and struck him—but not, in Knoxville’s opinion, hard enough for strong footage, so he’d insisted on a second round. And that was the end. During his six months of recovery, Knoxville found within himself a previously undetected shred of the self-preservation instinct. The days of bulls and rockets and demolition derbies were over.
In May, I attended a test screening of “Jackass: Best and Last” at the Paramount lot. The theatre was stocked with members of the target demo: men aged sixteen to forty. There were baseball hats and hand tattoos, mustaches hesitantly attempted and manfully achieved. There was even a mini altercation: just before showtime, two young men spotted each other across the room, hissed in confrontation, affected to converge, submitted to the calming attempts of bystanders, and took their seats.
Knoxville entered the room as the lights went down. He sat in the center of the fourth row and propped a clipboard on his lap. The screen lit up. “Jackass: Best and Last” mixes new and old footage, and the earlier clips are electrified by Knoxville’s cult-leader mania. In the new footage, which was filmed across five days in Santa Clarita, he emits a geniality that can visibly fade into resignation.
In the first ten minutes of the movie, someone offscreen asks Knoxville how he feels. “I’m sad,” he replies. No kidding.
There’s a Hemingway story, “The Undefeated,” about a veteran bullfighter who can’t keep himself out of the ring. Having barely recovered from a nasty injury, the bullfighter begs a promoter to give him a fight. The promoter agrees. With cash advance in hand, the bullfighter meets a friend at a bar. The friend warns him—over and over—that he’s too old to get in the ring. “What do you keep on doing it for?” the friend asks.
“I don’t know,” the bullfighter says. The next night, he is gored.
About the past, Knoxville is almost mystically serene. He doesn’t complain about back pain. He doesn’t dwell on mistakes. He’s fond of sayings like “The toothpaste is already out of the tube.” Unlike other cast members, he’s never once had a nightmare about filming “Jackass.” His wife says that he laughs in his sleep.
When he worries at all, he worries about the future. What will happen now that he can’t play the way he used to? Will the appetite fade from want of opportunity or explode from lack of outlet? If Johnny can’t run, what’s left?
Part of him finds the question ridiculous. These days, Knoxville behaves like a person with plenty to lose. He spends time with his family. He eats protein and steamed vegetables, goes on walks and hikes, drinks water. He takes finasteride to support hair growth. He moisturizes. On a pretty evening in June, with the Cadillac parked near Sunset under a strawberry sky, he talked through the many wonders life has dropped in his lap. “Everything’s happened at a fortunate time,” he said, gazing out the window at a man dressed as a pirate. “I’m finally happy. I’m in a really great place. My kids are growing up. They’re flourishing. I’ve met the person I’m supposed to be with. What more can you want?”
He scarcely paused before answering his own question.
“I do miss it sometimes. But I’m trying not to.”
Knoxville doesn’t keep track of how many bones he’s broken, but he’ll tell anyone who listens about his sixteen concussions—not to boast, but from some idea that saying the absurd number out loud will dampen his longing for stunts. “I’m still not there yet, and maybe I never will be,” he said. “I guess it’s the price I’ll pay for trying to make cartoons come to life.” ♦