Word: jackassable
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...grownup of a certain not-so-advanced age, there's nothing to make you feel ready for the cultural glue factory like MTV's stunt-comedy show Jackass. You see its young male pranksters riding and crashing shopping carts; getting turned upside down in a sloshingly full portable toilet; swallowing a goldfish and puking it into a bowl; dressing up like a disabled person and getting pushed off a wheelchair. And you think--and you know how this sounds even as you think it--This is funny...
Which is to say, you have entered the environs of Knoxville--as in Jackass star Johnny Knoxville, the alias of P.J. Clapp, 29, who started on the road to fame by sending MTV a video in which he had himself gassed with pepper spray and shot with a Taser. (He and MTV agreed not to air a segment of the video in which he put on a bulletproof vest and shot himself.) And if you're nonplussed--and maybe a tad defensive about being nonplussed ("But I'm cool! I liked Beavis and Butt-Head!")--Knoxville is doing...
Knoxville could be the poster child for the Rude Boy phenomenon: the gross, aggressive, self-mutilating young-male mode of rebellion du jour that is crashing its shopping cart head on into the mainstream. Jackass is the most successful cable launch of the season. Gross-out comedy rules at the movie box office and online, where Web animators exploit the Internet's seemingly limitless tolerance for vomit and poop jokes (for instance, at Doodie.com) This weekend NBC and UPN start airing the XFL, a football league created by the World Wrestling Federation's Vince McMahon and designed for ultraviolence (fair...
...ethnic stereotype. But these insurgents also attack the cult of self-esteem, the notion, advanced in the protest and therapy movements, that everyone has dignity, that positive self-image is the key to success, happiness and perhaps world peace. Rude Boy culture has a determined self-loathing streak. Jackass's jokes are sometimes directed at others, obnoxiously, ingeniously or both (a guy in a football uniform runs through a fast-food drive-thru lane, "intercepts" somebody's bagged meal, spikes it and does an end-zone dance). But besides the self-effacing title, the show is at heart about self...
...kicked. Witness too the fad among teenage boys who, in Fight Club fashion, stage their own real-life amateur-wrestling contests in their backyards, complete with deliberate cuts and chair smashing, in which the point is how much abuse you can take, not mete out. MTV, however, announces on Jackass that it won't accept stunt videos from home viewers. (It's not as if doing that ever got anyone his own TV show...