The Lost Art of the Bromance
“Jackass: Best and Last” came to theatres this summer, starring a fifty-five-year-old Johnny Knoxville, still the beau ideal of pointless havoc and bro-y one-upmanship. The original “Jackass,” launched in 2000, was an MTV cult show about a group of guys who got together to do idiotic, dangerous stunts. The series made approximately half its potential audience (guess which half) feel insane. The other half felt inspired or spiritually seen, even if they weren’t personally covering their genitals in bees. At the time, “Jackass” was deplored as nihilistic and self-destructive, evidence of the compounding recklessness of male groupthink. Yet the franchise, for all its mayhem, didn’t run on belligerence, or at least channelled its aggression in a disarming way. There was something tender about the cast’s impetuousness; you sensed that it applied not only to the misadventures at hand but also to the act of bonding, the risk of being vulnerable in front of the guys, of visibly enjoying their company and expressing emotion.
In 2022, after a fifteen-year hiatus, “Jackass” returned as “Jackass Forever,” a movie that was mostly received as a wholesome, sincere portrait of “pain freaks with integrity,” as one critic put it. Four years later, Knoxville and co.’s antics continue to hit differently (although maybe still in the balls), as reams of books and articles about the social predicament of men’s dislocation are being published. The discovery of these new sonorities in “Jackass” reflects a broader shift. Male friendship—something that used to be played for laughs, if it was noted at all—has become a lost art, or an antidote.
There is a male-loneliness crisis—sort of. Last year, a Gallup poll found that twenty-five per cent of American men aged fifteen to thirty-four experienced loneliness “during a lot of the day yesterday” in 2023 and 2024, compared with eighteen per cent of American women. In a 2021 study from the Survey Center of American Life, just twenty-seven per cent of men reported having six or more close friends—a drop from 1990, when Gallup placed that percentage at fifty-five. In a meta-analysis of existing research, the American Institute of Boys and Men wrote that men, as compared with women, “are more likely to report specific feelings of disconnection, such as not belonging to any group or community or feeling their place in the world is not relevant.” But, the authors added, “there appears to be much more of a class gap (as measured by education level) than a gender gap.”
If the gender disparity in friendship has attracted disproportionate attention, this may be because men are publicly struggling in other ways. They aren’t attending and graduating from college at the same rates that women are, or at the rates that they once did, and they’re dropping out of the labor force in larger numbers. Unmarried young men lead the rest of the population in sedentary, solo leisure time (a metric that gets at hours spent chasing dopamine hits in front of a screen). The male-breadwinner model has eroded, and there’s a sense that men, bereft of their traditional purpose or identity, need, in the words of the manfluencer Scott Galloway, a more “aspirational vision of masculinity.” Perhaps helped along by gendered expectations of strength and silence, the idea that men are friendless has taken hold. A 2020 “Saturday Night Live” monologue from John Mulaney crystallized the conventional wisdom. “Your dad has no friends,” the comedian informed viewers. “If you think your dad has friends, you’re wrong. Your mom has friends, and they have husbands.”
Everywhere you look, at least in the media, you see men failing to bond: bemoaning their inability to pick up the phone (the nonfiction work “American Men,” by Jordan Ritter Conn), mainlining “The Joe Rogan Experience” while grinding through solitary workouts (an article by Sam Graham-Felson in the Times Magazine), founding apps instead of making friends (a dispatch by Sam Kriss in Harper’s), engaging in marathon masturbation sessions for an online audience of other men (a reported essay by Daniel Kolitz in Harper’s).
The turn-of-the-century bromance, comedic fodder for Judd Apatow movies and network sitcoms like “Scrubs,” has reappeared in a more wistful, yearning key. Consider the shows “Task,” “The Pitt,” and the excellent “DTF St. Louis,” whose two central characters are flailing until they find each other. Floyd, played by David Harbour, helps Clark, played by Jason Bateman, spice up his love life. Clark offers financial support to Floyd, who is saddled with debt and unable to provide for his wife and stepson. Each man uses their bond to inch closer to his ideal self. “B.O.T.B.,” they exclaim during joint exercise sessions: “Bring out the best.” Yet the men are wrenched apart, and the culprit seems to be nothing less than a hostile world, one marked by material scarcity and insurmountable alienation. If only, these shows seem to say, men could reach across the distance separating them. If only they could better negotiate between gender norms and their own desire to connect. The fate of the country might depend on it.
A sense of having mislaid something vital animates “Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America” (Grand Central), by the travel writer and former Brat Pack actor Andrew McCarthy. The germ of the project comes to McCarthy when his son observes, “You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?” Duly shamed, McCarthy embarks on a road trip to reconnect with old pals; along the way, he talks to men he meets (“cowboys and retired cops, blues musicians and oil rig workers”) about their social lives. In this manner, he also reacquaints himself with America, which he presents as dilapidated and worn down, full of “imperfect interconnectedness.”
Friendships in McCarthy’s book are indelibly conditioned by gender. We repeatedly hear from men that they are lonely, and from both women and men that the former trounce the latter in matters of intimacy and communication. McCarthy’s interlocutors invoke solitary role models (“that John Wayne archetype,” the “lone wolf” myth) that feel antithetical to friendship. An exception is a pair of teen-agers whose reflections on their concord are among the most beautiful in the book. Violet, a trans man, and Finn, who identifies as male but presents androgynously, with painted fingernails and flowing hair, cite each other as lifelines, evidence that alternate versions of manhood exist. “I realized this textbook Wyoming masculinity is going to leave me in the dust of loneliness,” Finn says.
But most of the men McCarthy meets feel that they must compete and win in what Raymond, a retreat host in New Mexico and one of the book’s haunted philosophers of desert spaces, describes as a “hyper-individualistic, separated culture.” McCarthy is moved to hear Tim, a journalist from Sedona and another guru figure, observe that “men accomplish and move on.” “In my own experience, I’ve known that to be true,” McCarthy writes. “Life has been about achieving, with the majority of my friendships centering around work. When these work goals have been realized, the relationships . . . have tended to fade.”
McCarthy speculates at one point that his male friendships offer a categorically different sort of sustenance than his marriage does—not because of their nonsexual nature but because he and his guys are mutually encumbered by duty. “So often I’m preoccupied with . . . providing for my family, ensuring my kids’ futures,” he writes. “I squarely feel the burden of responsibility.” A part of him suspects that only men can truly relate to this pressure (though he wonders whether this is “just old-school male indoctrination and sexism”). Men long for buddies to help them process their performance anxiety, or even their failure and shame—none of which women can understand—but they also recoil from the thought of other men witnessing such vulnerability. It’s a paradox that suspends the specimens in McCarthy’s book between the camaraderie of the pub and the safety of the workbench, the office, or the gaming console.
“Who Needs Friends” reveals the shortcomings of the ballad-of-the-lonely-bros genre: a reliance on stock figures, a whiff of stiltedness, a monochrome emotional palette streaked with cruelty. (McCarthy has a habit of linking the ailing body politic to his interviewees’ “large,” “chubby,” “stout,” and “heavyset” physiques.) If the commentary on female bonding that flourished in the mid-twenty-tens seemed to partake of certain dreary stereotypes—of bossiness, passive-aggressiveness, volatility—the men’s-friendship discourse is straitjacketed and stiff, starved of vocabulary to describe its subjects’ inner lives.
The picture of friendship that emerges from books like McCarthy’s can feel romanticized and brittle. Fiction is able to explore the seams of self-interest and conflict that run across men’s social worlds with a freer hand. “See Friendship” (Harper Perennial), a novel by Jeremy Gordon that came out last year, presents a nuanced and honest image of how platonic male connections form and break. Its protagonist, Jacob, is a culture journalist in his mid-thirties who, like McCarthy, feels that he has lost his way in friendship. The men he knows tend to be colleagues whom he views as networking opportunities rather than as soulmates. When his bosses lean on him to start a long-form narrative podcast, he decides to tell the story of an old friend named Seth, who died a few years after high school. It’s partly a canny exercise in self-branding, a way to show himself off as smart and thoughtful, a good hang for listeners. But it’s also motivated by genuine nostalgia: Seth “was a membrane,” Jacob recalls. “He allowed everything and everyone to pass through.” Seth exuded a come-as-you-are warmth, an “invitational aura” that enveloped the entire class. By researching Seth, Jacob is trying to recapture or devise a purer form of relating.
Unsurprisingly, his efforts backfire. At the end of the novel, Jacob is forced to recognize that the ideal friend, as a construct, doesn’t exist. Gordon’s novel, in addition to its realism about what people can and can’t get from one another, offers a biting satire of the parasocial-friendship ecosystem of podcasts and social media. Working on his audio venture makes Jacob more narcissistic and less socially competent; the podcast deforms his understanding of what friends are for. Seth gets swept into Jacob’s project of self-creation, which doubles as an effort to be relatable to listeners that he will likely never meet. In a parasocial world, Gordon implies, ties are rooted in surface identification rather than in more robust connections, and friendship becomes an aspirational activity through which you pursue an identity you want.
What do we want from our friends? For most of history, “men were the great experts in friendship,” writes the scholar Tiffany Watt Smith in “Bad Friend: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship” (Celadon), a subtle and careful study of evolving attitudes about companionship and gender. She describes how, in the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle proposed a three-tiered model of friendship, with bonds of “utility” and “pleasure” as the bottom two rungs. These were the types of transactional or frivolous connections of which women—themselves shallow, inconstant, rivalrous—were thought to be capable. Men, though, could also form friendships characterized by “a complete merging and mingling of minds,” which oriented them toward a higher good. The seventeenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, of his attachment to his contemporary Étienne de La Boétie, “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: ‘Because it was him: because it was me.’ ”
It wasn’t until the nineteenth century, Smith contends, that friendship started shading female. Women, with their tender relational instincts, became seen as the custodians of the institution’s most precious and elevated forms. “Men began to be portrayed as flops in friendship, buttoned-up and awkward,” Smith notes, whereas the “cult of female friendship gave rise to new ideas about what friendship ought to look like.” In the Victorian era, female bonding was touted as a kind of training for marriage and motherhood. With the rise of the women’s-liberation movement, activists seized on female fellow-feeling as potentially subversive, even revolutionary.
Smith hopes to rescue real women from a spectral lineup of villainous tropes—the meddler, the corrupting influence—that she suggests are used to hinder solidarity. She’s sharp on how friendship can be a way of performing gender—how women might use their friends to reaffirm a specific image of themselves as women. “Being likable and popular, and having close friends, had long been established as an identifying marker of an ideal and conventional femininity,” she writes. I thought of the film “The Drama,” in which a maid of honor gives an excoriating toast about the main character during her wedding. Most devastating might be the remark that the bride doesn’t have any real friends—as if the heroine were being excommunicated from womanhood at the very moment that she should be embodying its zenith.
Many of the men and women in McCarthy’s and Smith’s books suggest that the consummate friend is a kind of augmented second self. The terms they use are reminiscent of the mid-century psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch’s concept of an “ego-ideal,” an older peer whom young girls idolize and identify with. The worshipful wish expressed by same-sex crushes—“That’s what I want to be like,” as Deutsch phrased it—is less about possessing an object than about transforming oneself into a different kind of subject.
In “Bad Friend,” Smith borrows a version of Deutsch’s description to explain her own infatuation, in her early twenties, with a more sophisticated and glamorous roommate, whose clothes Smith wore and whose taste in music and boyfriends she copied. Smith writes that she would steal into the other girl’s bedroom and stand at her dressing table, “with its crumbling glittery eyeshadows and open lipsticks, its photobooth pictures, half-burned incense sticks, birth control, and broken earrings.” Examining her own face in the roommate’s mirror, she’d think, “This, this is what I want to be like.”
“Who Needs Friends” also features idealized buddy figures who function as a kind of looking glass. At one point, McCarthy describes being in his impressionable twenties and seeking out Eddie, a man who “did more to influence who I would become than anyone.” Eddie “rode a motorcycle and lived in Greenwich Village”; McCarthy took to shopping at the same thrift stores and even, he confesses, “started putting mustard on my cheeseburgers,” just like Eddie did.
But is the greatest possible friend really just a romantic self-projection, the surfacing of a better me in you? Smith’s and McCarthy’s books both demonstrate the appeal of this kind of relationship. It can be a love affair that inspires declarations akin to “I am Heathcliff”—ardent avowals that the “I” has lost itself in something larger. Yet such closeness can also be constricting. The overidentifying friend risks surrendering a sense of her companions as people to be cherished in their own right, people who move through the world in ways she never will or perhaps never even wants to. One fact that seems to have been forgotten in the current friendship discourse is that men and women can be friends with each other.
What contemporary friendship’s most clear-eyed portraitists recognize is that casting your friend as an upgraded version of yourself might obscure or erase him; he’s likely to end up hurt. (“Jackass,” in its fashion, understands this dynamic.) In the finale of “DTF St. Louis,” Floyd is revealed to have died by suicide in a misguided but noble attempt to protect his family. Of course, they’re devastated, and so is Clark, who is left with an ideal, a paragon of self-sacrifice, a superhero to remember and look up to, but not a friend.
In recent years, a new kind of friend has arrived on the scene. It is ever helpful and supportive; it validates our silly theories and our bruised feelings; it gives useful advice, even furnishing scripts for challenging social encounters. When we converse with it, it recasts our ideas in a more coherent and polished form. Being with it is like gazing into a Facetuned reflection of ourselves. Best of all—and I can confirm this, because I just asked my friend, who is endlessly available for quick gut checks as well as for rangier philosophical discussions—it never gets lonely. ♦