When Andy Warhol made his prophetic comment about fame, he could not possibly have anticipated the lengths some would go to get their 15 minutes. Consider Johnny Knoxville and his posse of merry pranksters. These are America's funniest home videos, a generous and representative sampling of segments from the notorious MTV series
Jackass, which capture men behaving very badly, and very stupidly. Knoxville and company are mostly content to do injury to themselves and each other (their poor and battered groins alone must be eligible for combat pay). Other segments have a demented
Candid Camera quality. In one, Chris Pontius dons a werewolf suit and runs amok through London. In another, two hockey players continue their "fight" inside a store. Throwaway bits, such as the popping of a blackhead, cleanse the palate between stunts. As one observer notes: "You'd have to be an idiot to try this." Watching this, however, is another matter. And by the way, there is no volume 1; go figure.
Volume 3 is everything you want in a Jackass compilation, and more: more arrested adolescent behavior, more outrageous stunts and pranks, more "poo." Pogo-stick skateboarding, ice-block downhill skating, and backwards bull-riding are representative of the way-extreme stunts that have made Johnny Knoxville and his posse folk heroes to Generation BMX. But Jackass turns it up to 11 with its fearless forays into public performance art. In one of the more benign segments, Rick Kosick shaves his head and dons a frightful toupee, which he proceeds to drop in front of people. Funnier are the bits with Knoxville convincingly costumed as a 90-year-old man. In a more grisly segment, Knoxville and a partner subject an unsuspecting carpet cleaner to a bloody scene of escalating mayhem. And it wouldn't be Jackass without frontal assaults on the groin. Guaranteed to get the party started, this volume, at 78 minutes, has tremendous shock value. --Donald Liebenson
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