Laughing With the Pain

Jackass, the MTV reality show documenting the catastrophic and grotesque stunts of Johnny Knoxville and his pals, aired just twenty-five episodes on MTV before concluding its initial run in 2001. Upon colliding with American culture, the show fractured into spin-offs and a series of films, which one critic hailed as “the most shocking theatrical experience since the mythic mid-1890s screening of the Lumière brothers’ ‘Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.'” Natalie Marlin came to the Jackass films as she began transitioning. “I belong to a demographic more statistically prone to pain than most people who appear in a Jackass film,” Marlin writes. And yet, as she watches, Marlin admires the camaraderie of the Jackass gang, recognizing something of her experience in their collective pain and consolation. “If there is a saving grace to all the discomfort and hurt we go through in transition, it’s knowing that we can find others like us, others we can trust with our pain,” she writes. “And, most importantly, others with whom we can laugh about our experiences, who also recognize the humor in our very existence.”

One of Jackass’s perpetual charms is that it feels like it can belong to anybody, that anybody can become a part of it. There’s an endearingly romantic quality in the murkiness and low fidelity of the digital video camcorders used for Jackass: The Movie, as though you’d stumbled across the perverse DIY tapes of any number of guys you might know. The cinematographic intimacy and low-stakes nature of these early affairs is, in itself, a kind of rhetorical invitation for the viewer, a shorthand for proximity and verisimilitude: the men onscreen are not all that different from you or me.

There’s a lineage to this kind of style, most transparent in the first Jackass film’s tip to its roots in skate culture. Like Jackass, underground skate videos of the 1980s and ‘90s offered glimpses into what any skating community might be like—what tricks a crew might want to show off, what music it associates with its style, what the collective camaraderie might be. These videos, too, were a kind of invitation for viewers, a way for fellow skaters or enthusiasts to feel a part of otherwise inaccessible spaces. And to be given a chance to witness is to be given a chance to be included.