"Jackass Forever" is Generation X's Gift to a Sad, Angry, Humorless World

What the world needs now is love, and a film about some dudes getting hit in the nuts.

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It was 2006 and, to that point, the worst time of my life.

I was in my mid-20s and just days earlier had buried my best friend. It was but one in a series of funerals for young men I’d attended during a three-year period that I don’t particularly care to revisit. 

I hated my job, but it was easy enough that I could perform it while drunk a lot of the time with no one noticing. I had pretty much forgotten how to experience joy. 

And then one of my buddies invited me to the Magic Johnson Cinemas on 125th Street to see Jackass Number Two (the title, a poop joke). It was a Friday afternoon and it was a packed theater. 

(If you’ve never seen any Jackass content, here’s the elevator pitch: A bunch of Gen X white dudes perform incredibly idiotic and dangerous stunts, with a healthy smattering of gratuitous dick and fart jokes, for no other reason than it’s really funny.) 

I don’t remember a single stunt from Jackass Number Two today, I just remember how badly I needed to howl with laughter at deliberately stupid scenarios in the welcome company of a couple hundred other hysterical idiots. 

It was the mindless catharsis I needed. For a brief, blissful moment, my head was cleared of agonizing guilt, anger, and sadness. The only times I had ever come close to this level of “letting go” as a (much younger) adult were under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms—which in their best moments and in the right environment stripped me of ego, and let me both laugh and cry with equal abandon.  

This was over a decade-and-a-half ago. I know they made a third Jackass movie at some point. I probably saw it. But I can’t be sure, because I don’t remember. 

In fact, if I hadn’t exactly forgotten Jackass ever existed in the years between, it most certainly hasn’t been at the front of my brain for a long time. 

Jackass Forever—the fourth film in a franchise that started as an MTV series in 2000—was released last week to rapturous reviews.

In fact, the movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes shows that critical consensus has risen steadily through each of the four Jackass movies—49% fresh for the first one, followed by 64%, then 66%—and now 85%! 

Jackass Forever is, quite literally and unbelievably, critically acclaimed. 

I went to see the new film, by myself, on a freezing cold night, just about two years into this bleak, horrible future known as the Covid-19 pandemic. There were about 80 people in a theater that could fit around 300. (By far the largest movie theater audience I’ve been a part of since February 2020.)

Much in the way Jackass Number Two spoke to me during a time of existential crisis, Jackass Forever for about 90 minutes freed me from the stresses and trauma of life in “forever Covid” malaise. 

Indeed, it’s possible that what the entire world needs now, is love sweet love, and Jackass Forever.

Generation X’s Greatest Contribution to Humanity

Jackass was born out of 90s skateboarding culture. I was never a skater myself, but enough of my friends were that I had little choice but to watch a lot of “underground” skateboard VHS tapes. There was no shortage of gruesome skater wipeouts on these tapes but, quite often, the dumb-for-dumb’s-sake stunts were the stars of the show. 

When Jackass debuted on MTV in the early 2000s, the youngest Gen Xers (myself included) were just entering their 20s. The illusion of the 90s nonstop growth economy had recently come crashing to earth, most embodied by the bursting of the Web 1.0 “dot-com bubble.” Then came 9/11, then Iraq, then the 2008 financial meltdown, then the rise of anti-democratic right-wing populism, then a “cancel culture” that knows no statutes of limitations, and of course—the fucking Covid pandemic. 

Generation X's time atop the pop culture throne was blink-and-you'd-miss-it brief—which is befitting of the smallest generation, the latchkey kids of divorced Boomer parents generation, the cynical in youth and angry-ever-since generation.  

Some of Gen X’s greatest cultural contributions—which include the golden age of hip-hop and the early entries of what unfortunately became known as “alternative rock”—still hold up, artistically. But their cultural relevance is niche, at best.

Now, us Gen Xers are in our 40s and 50s. A lot of us have both young kids and aging parents. It’s possible that not a single one of us will be president. (America voted for a guy too old to be a boomer, rather than pass the torch to Gen X.) We’re in our “prime” at a time in modern history that certainly isn’t the Great Depression or a World War—but it still objectively, absolutely sucks. 

It sure feels like time and history have finally earned us what had been the unearned cynicism of our youth. 

That’s why Jackass Forever might be Generation X’s greatest cultural contribution, because it’s the right movie for the wrong time.

All due respect to the political satirists and corporate superhero machines, what the people need right now is to laugh at juvenile stunts, good-natured pranks on innocent civilians, and (at times) gratuitous scatological humor. (I’ll never forget Ryan Dunn stuffing a Hot Wheels car up his butt and then going to a doctor for an X-ray. RIP, Ryan.)

This kind of stuff was boundary-pushing two decades ago, today it’s unbelievably “problematic.” Some Jackass jokes could be ungenerously interpreted in any number of ways. But that misses the humanity of Jackass Forever. 

What comes across in nearly every scene of the film is that this is a group of friends. And even when they’re torturing each other, there’s a respect, there are boundaries, and there are congratulations for bravery at the end. 

Admittedly, our divided era means the bar is low for collective experiences, but there’s a universal quality to Jackass Forever. 

Watching friends humiliate themselves—while refusing to be humiliated, because after all, they’re fucking badasses—has therapeutic value. 

When I saw NHL star P.K. Subban fire pucks into a Jackass’ crotch, I forgot my troubles. When Steve-O put a queen bee on his penis and attracted an entire hive of worker bees to it, I could barely bring myself to watch, and also couldn’t look away. When 50-year-old Johnny Knoxville was knocked unconscious after being launched into the air by a charging bull, the other Jackasses’ concern was apparent, and his eventual recovery was victorious. I was genuinely touched.

With its self-effacing humor, benign nihilism, and unabashed self-referentialism, Jackass Forever is quintessential Gen X art. And coming as it does at a particularly humorless time, its unselfconscious assholery feels like a gift to the world.  

The film is an opportunity to forget the fact that pretty soon, a million Americans will have died of COVID. You also don’t have to think about the fraying of democracy while watching some Jackass play penis paddle-ball. And you need not worry that you’re going to get caught laughing at something of which you “shouldn’t” be laughing—because a bunch of idiots are laughing their asses off right beside you. 

Jackass is freedom, it is healing, it is love.