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Jackass

As you’ll see with the next entry, MTV really knew what it was getting into with various shows that hit around 2000. With Jackass, the concept was simple: a bunch of guys do a bunch of stupid crap. One of the most curious elements of the series has been the involvement of one Spike Jonze. Yes, the Spike Jonze of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Where The Wild Things Are is one of the people who’s been a producer of Jackass since the very beginning. How do we relate Jonze’s superior directing work over the past decade with the lowbrow goofing off that takes place on Jackass? Who’s to say, aside from the simple, unavoidable and somewhat embarrassing fact that…yeah, Jackass is stupid, crass, idiotic, and so on, but it can also be really, really funny.

I’m still somewhat surprised that there’s a third Jackass movie being released. I remember seeing the first one in the fall of 2002 as a freshman in college. I was at the local theater with one of my roommates on a Friday night, the night it opened. We were two of maybe ten people in the audience. We both ate it up (and having seen the first two, I still think the first is best, by being disgusting but not too cringe-worthy), but I figured it would flop. Of course, by costing very little and making back enough to be profitable, Jackass is now a trilogy of films. Performance art comes in many, demented forms, and even if they’re not intentionally trying to be this way, the people behind Jackass are performance artists. They’re the court jesters of performance art, but it’s still what they are.

Freddy Got Fingered

It might hurt you to remember, but there was once a time when Tom Green was one of the most popular people in America. Of course, these were back in the days when making fun of MTV for not showing music videos anymore was just barely becoming obnoxious. Jersey Shore was nowhere near showing up on anyone’s radar; Tom Green in the movies was meant to be a big box office draw. And then his first starring role, Freddy Got Fingered, came out in theaters. The movie didn’t flop nearly as hard as you might think: its budget was $14 million and made just about that much money at the domestic box office. But the reviews were almost universally horrible, and Green’s career tumbled afterwards. Whether you like the movie, you hate it, or like most people, you haven’t seen it, we can agree that Tom Green became popular as a performance artist.

Most performance artists often want to get as much attention as possible; how else do you know when they’re working? They’re not often truly well-known (Joaquin Phoenix and James Franco, during his General Hospital stint, are among the more recently famous), but they do a lot to get noticed. These days, MTV is a great place for performance artists to get their time in the sun - because that’s what Jersey Shore is, right? - and Tom Green may have been the smartest, most self-aware of all. For what ended up only being a couple of years, but felt a lot longer, he was able to become one of the network’s biggest stars by being as outrageous as possible. Many people will talk about how far they’ll go for a joke, but Green went far just to get a reaction. Freddy Got Fingered was not financially successful, but you get the feeling that Green was happy just seeing people react to the movie at all.

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