Cries of 'woke' and 'cancel culture' belong nowhere near Jackass, according to Johnny Knoxville. After all, 'if you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough'.
It's among the most repeated whines to emerge from the half-life, volatile cycle of pop discourse: apparently, cancel culture is killing comedy. Chris Rock said, 'Everybody’s scared to make a move,' Dawn French claimed 'edgy' material would earn a comic 'haters', and even the inimitable Sir Billy Connolly believes he'd be cancelled for his 'fearless' material (of course, the Big Yin's stand-ups are impenetrable).
The opposing proof is in Jackass's sh*t-caked, bile-inducing pudding: just look at Terror Taxi, a skit where a white man poses as a terrorist with pubic hair on his face (I'll give you one guess on the racial guise); and The Switcheroo, where Preston Lacy swaps out for Phil Margera in the middle of the night and 'cops a feel' of April. Those moments, and plenty more, and Jackass has never been 'cancelled', so to coin the term – and it never will, because the notion is totally irrelevant to their modus operandi.
We're days away from the release of Jackass Forever, the fourth big-screen parade for MTV's loveable band of prank-hardy scoundrels. While there's not quite as many 'man on the street' japes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the boys (plus the first-ever lady Jackass, Rachel Wolfson) 'turned it up on themselves'.
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I sat down with Johnny Knoxville to talk about the movie, the history of Jackass and why the series will never be subjected to the woes of so-called cancel culture.
When asked whether they felt a need to restrain themselves in today's more reactive climate, he said, 'No, we didn't have to bite our tongue at all, because slapstick... you can't really come at slapstick with the cancel culture.'
Look back to Terror Taxi (which just so happens to be a common favourite among the legacy stars): even while Danger Ehren sings to the devious cackles of his co-stars, supposedly based on his 9/11 research, he makes a point of noting how it's not intended to mock anyone specific; if anything, it's satirising other people's prejudices and paranoia.
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And that's just the point: when it comes to Jackass, they're only ever laughing at themselves, nobody else. 'It's comedy, and the spirit of our films... you can't come after that. All the meanness happens to each other,' Knoxville continued.
'We're not mean to other people, and we're not meaning to make other people look like assholes. We wanna make ourselves the butt of the joke. That has nothing to do with Jackass.'
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Topics: Entertainment, Jackass, Johnny Knoxville, Film and TV
Cameron Frew