The High Art Of Jackass

Johnny Knoxville stumbles into the Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, Calif., shivering and bleeding from his head, woozy with a concussion--but the staff just laughs at him. "Hey, it's Johnny Knoxville!" yells a male nurse. "A stunt must have gone bad, huh?" Knoxville has a blood-soaked gauze tourniquet wrapped around the top of his head and is wearing a pink bathrobe; he looks like a cross-dressing Civil War re-enactor. He needs half a dozen or so stitches to the back of his scalp but decides to leave the hospital when the doctors refuse to let the surgery be filmed. As he signs himself out with a shaky hand, he looks up at the receiving nurses and asks exactly what document he's signing. "Autographs for us," one says. "Can you do this one to my nephews, Paul and Anthony?"

Knoxville (who uses his real name, P.J. Clapp, off-camera) has made a career for himself by damaging his body in spectacular ways. Until Ozzy Osbourne let cameras into his living room, Knoxville's show, Jackass--it's named for the idiocy of the stunts performed on it--was MTV's most popular program ever. In it, Knoxville and his skateboarding pals would go on adventures like shooting one another with stun guns, sitting in a well-used Porta Potti while it is flipped upside down and competing in a hard-boiled-egg-eating-and-barfing contest. If you are of a certain gender and age, this is the funniest stuff in the world. Knoxville created a new kind of comedy, one in which he gets laughs not out of the audience's surprise but their discomfort.

Though Knoxville and his band of modern-day Knievels made only 25 episodes (the series was cut short after running into criticism from parents and Senators), their craft lives on, not only in imitation homemade, backyard-wrestling-style tapes advertised in late-night cable commercials but also in their final project: a new MTV film, Jackass: The Movie, opening this week. The movie differs from the TV show mostly in that it will be shown in theaters.

Knoxville has already scored decent roles in movies like Men in Black II and has signed a deal with Fox for a possible sitcom, so it's not really clear why a 31-year-old man with a wife and a daughter would want to do this to himself one last time. "A lot of stand-up comedy guys, when they get a little famous, just give up their stand-up career, and it cancels out the thing that set them apart," said Knoxville in his Hollywood film-production office as he was shooting the last few scenes of the movie. "They give it up, and they're middle-of-the-road."

The Jackass film office is a mess. Two dogs run around. The doorbell rings, and the secretary, busy trying to work the typewriter, yells for someone to open the door. Two workmen arrive to replace the broken conference table for the fourth time. The director of photography shows up for his 9 a.m. call at 2:45 p.m., and he hasn't missed anything. Half-empty bottles of whiskey lie everywhere. It's a brief glimpse into what the world would look like if it were run by high school dropouts.