Rude Boys

Nor are things what they once were for the grunts of the XFL, who, the league promises, will get hit harder than their NFL colleagues for far less money while having to wear mikes and get pestered by reporters in midgame. If not intentionally, the XFL is a little like Harold in Harold and Maude, feigning bloodlust to repulse his militaristic uncle; it holds a funhouse mirror up to your father's game, exaggerating everything unsettling about it and daring fans of the original to take offense.

So after this Jockerdammerung, who's left for young guys to worship? Performers like Knoxville seem to be staking out an alternative jockdom, a macho loserhood. Getting knocked out by a pro boxer, showing off his scrawny, bruised and welted body, Knoxville shows us he's man enough to get his butt 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.)

In a sense, Knoxville and his cohort are the 21st century answer to '70s and '80s punks, who created a sort of poison-pill culture, adopting antisocial poses that couldn't be appropriated by the mainstream and practicing self-mutilating rites, like safety-pin piercing, too gross or painful for the masses. In Jackass's case, the connection is more than theoretical: Knoxville first made his Taser video for the skateboarding magazine Big Brother--the skate and punk communities have a long, symbiotic relationship--and many of his show's stunts are straight out of skate-punk culture. The big difference is that theirs is a highly corporate punk rock, eagerly appropriated, encouraged and even created by giant entertainment companies.

Which means that these Rude Boys may be vulnerable to their fickle young market's tendency to grow jaded. Eventually we'll even see the day when their kids will have to figure out how to shock them. For now, however, we all live in Knoxville.