I’ll always remember when my friend Andy jumped off a wall and cut his head open really badly.
But in my mind’s eye, he is for ever suspended in mid-air, sun gleaming behind him, never coming down.
Another time, I jumped out of a really tall tree and landed in a bog. It stank and I ripped all the skin off my arm.
But it was funny, and that was the most important thing.
As I got older, I desperately thought of ways to monetise this idiocy.
Luckily, Vice existed, and that millennial publication seemed to enjoy paying me to pull off outlandish stunts, either in writing or on screen.
I ate a fry-up so large I threw up and got beaten up by the world champion of shin-kicking.
One time they even put my Wetherspoon’s table number on the Vice Twitter account and made me eat and drink everything that was ordered there.
That was some good stupid.
Why the Idiocy?
Why did I (and Jackass) do all this?
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In Philippa Snow’s book Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury As Art and Entertainment, she notes that Jackass “resembles a post-9/11 show, with its giddy violence sometimes mirroring the helpless, hopeless mania that follows serious trauma”.
The intense on-screen camaraderie of the Jackass gang, she says, seems to arise from “the muddling of terror and eroticism inherent in being made aware of one’s mortality”.
