The Kids of Jackass

Try This At Home

Jul 25, 2024

Me and my dumb little buddies undropped bollocks sure took a battering.

With a big, bad squeaky “Suck y’mum!” to the limp disclaimer before each episode of MTV’s Jackass, we spent our days brainstorming increasingly creative means of bruising them.

We must have been about 12 or 13ish. Armed with a mate’s mum’s camcorder, we would tape over the shoddy coverage of a recent christening, with our very own watered-down tribute to our MTV idols.

We weren’t alone. The same lightbulb lit up above the head of loads of us shitty little brats the world-over, who considered, then thought better of, headbutting it. There was even an online community - I can’t find it now, something like www.amateurjackass.co.uk - where these falsetto homages were ranked on their adjudged gnarliness.

Picture lots of spindly teens wearing tough faces in well-maintained gardens, exchanging punts to the gooch at the going rate. The introduction of Big-toe to perineum, always inexactly timed with a painful Nu-Metal guitar riff.

I hunted down and interviewed someone else who rode, and semi-deliberately tumbled off, the early noughties Am-Jack wave.

Swapping tales with a fellow backyard stuntsman, felt close to what it must have been like for grizzly ol’ seafarers hanging out, one-upping each other with yarns of life at sea. Just, instead of tales of grappling with sea monsters, sharing experiences of consciously crapping yourself to score cheap laughs and short-lived props.

“Back in the day, on the way home from school, I deliberately shat myself for a samosa, a packet of chewits and a laugh” I boasted, for the first time in 20+ years.

“Haha I feel you, man, I bit a dogturd for a 10-deck of Mayfair.”

This guy get it. The warped honour of it all.

The only thing holding back my oh-so Haggard stunt squadron back, was our tendency towards gutlessness. The hours on hours of footage consist of our gawky features psyching themselves up for a death-defying 4.5-foot drop, normally into spongey shrubbery. Or flinching with scaredycat-like reflexes for the incoming impact of a spatula.

We’d forever be fucking each other over, replicating Jackass’s tit-for-tat on-screen attacks, just a whole lot less mercilessly. Maybe, a good-natured, sneak-plunger-attack, followed up with an apology and then back, unharmed in time for tea.

It’s plain cute how seriously we took our small-fry reproduction. We all gave Johny Knoxville-style intros to camera, no matter how self-explanatory or yellow-bellied the stunt.

“Hi! I’m Sam, and this is the Head-Biscuit-Tin.”

*gets conked round the head with a Rose’s X-mas cylinder*
*exaggerates pain*
*cue requisite super-close up of non-existent impact wound*

Our wimpy exploits were all set to a backdrop of the tried and tested goading formula we learned from Steve-O and co: 2 parts taunting to 1 encouragement.

“Do it, you pussy. Come on, you little bitch, you can do it. It’s nothing. It’s not that far (you pussy). Do it.”

Occasionally, we’d muster up the bottle to attempt something that wasn’t adorably tame. I did 4/7 of a front flip off my shed and onto my growing spine - (and some light bedding - like one or 2 sleeping bags - still pretty X-treme),

My butthole entertained a lit firecracker. It was pretty boorish as far as guests go. The scabby aftermath bore, a crater into my pasty bum, and a charming likeness to the Japanese flag. It didn’t sit right with me for some time. In terms of actual physical sitting, not an objection to the proud nation of Japan. Who, incidentally, do have a culture of being very accommodating hosts.

I snorted up a plain selfish line of my mates’ assorted pubes. It ruined lasagne that evening, and for some time after. Hoovering up the motley lot, gave me a real sense of pride. This changed a year or so later, when it became clear, pube-snorting capabilities, weren’t all that high on most teenage girls’ boyfriend checklist. Who knew, ey?

In hindsight, I was championing the cause. I was the star, goddammit!

No one ever got properly hurt. Although, once, we were a few inches off our own sensationalized tabloid headline. Being a model dickhead bully older brother, I forced my little bro into jumping off our shed into an upturned compost bin.

We’d all done it, as I told him again and again. After weighing it up for a while - like the child that he, in fact, was - so did he. On landing, his little head jutted out of a hole in the bin and he was inches from catching his neck.

I still dwell on that sometimes. But the extent of my concern at the time - “Awesome! Gnarly! Sibling-paralysingly-X-treme!” I even froze a screenshot of his head popping out in the Windows Movie Maker edit. What a cunt.

A few of us truly believed we would build our 8 minutes 23 seconds of hardcore footage into a feature-length film, which is really kind of sweet. Launching our own stunt career, seemed just a matter of grazing our way up the national rankings. Or sending the footage to MTV, because the disclaimer’s blatantly bullshit, I bet they blatantly do watch clips people send in, and once they see our brave, unique take on the genre, they’ll have no choice but to commission us for a series - minimum.

The Jackass warning. - Child Of The 80s & 90s | Facebook

My elder brother, a retired assessed-risk taker himself, warmly suggested I’d probably grow out of it. This mug doesn’t get it, I thought. This is a lifestyle, baby!

We were too obviously children for even the dodgiest corner shops to serve us, and we didn’t want or need booze anyway. Overcoming the addictive unease before each two-bit shenanigan was its own rush. All pushing and huddling around the screen in giggly anticipation was a laugh, it was something to do. When your 16-tog landing inevitably looked feeble, it was something to do again, more theatrically. There’s a real camaraderie in coaxing your best friends into wrecking themselves for a common goal.

We were young enough to unselfconsciously behave like silly kids, but we felt like we had everything figured out - gallivanting around, seeking out tameable thrills on our bikes, hunting for the killer piece of footage that would be the making of us.

We were only abstractly fussed about girls. Our leader had reportedly fingered one and our ginger mate made a dubious, later disproved, claim he had too. It was the last sniff of childhood, before everyone assimilated into the meanest kid’s take on coolness. Overnight our close friendship circle mutated into a fucked-up gladiator pit of insecurity, with everyone clawing at each other for social status and female attention.

Suddenly, being the most willing to eat butter-kissed popcorn out of your own butthole, was no longer the status symbol, it, maybe never, was. Only slightly exaggerated, word getting out about my gram-a-day pube habit, surprisingly, didn’t do me any massive favours with the young lay-days. They couldn’t see past the whole pubes side, to the determination, the courageousness of it.

When faced with the challenges of adult, I sometimes think, I snorted that multicoloured jungle of pubes with a smile on my face. I can do anything.