I’m watching Steve-O get his butt cheeks pierced together and thinking about how I’m probably in worse pain, and I’d trade places with him if I could. And for the first time in days, I’m laughing. “I’m sick of this pooping thing. I’m gonna get my butt cheeks pierced,” the wide-eyed comedian with a shaved head and dazzling white teeth says in a 2001 episode of Jackass.
What’s now perhaps best known as a movie franchise began as an MTV show about men doing dangerously stupid things with their friends. It was the only thing I could bring myself to watch on a Thursday afternoon while I had a miscarriage.
“Yeah, it hurts like crazy,” Steve-O says, smiling after defying physics to, indeed, get his butt cheeks pierced together. He takes the piercing out, but I decided I’d rather get that than continue bleeding out this embryo I’d begged God for.
For hours I did this — watched young stuntmen and skateboarders submit themselves to a vast array of dumb pranks, and mentally declare myself more willing to be in their shoes than mine: Ryan Dunn sticking a toy car up his butt simply to get a funny-looking X-ray, Bam Margera randomly attacking his dad and getting attacked back, Chris Pontius running around a Japanese department store in a thong, Jason “Wee Man” Acuña trying to bungee jump off of Preston Lacy, Dave England skateboarding across barrels of water and Ehren “Danger Ehren” McGhehey carrying a tray of soup before getting whaled by a giant hand.
I’m sorry if you don’t find pain funny because it’s an excellent coping mechanism. I spent my childhood thinking I could be in Rocket Power or any number of Disney’s extreme sports inspiration movies, constantly wounding myself for the sake of gaining attention or shedding boredom. My calcium levels were perfectly fine, but my athletic abilities were lacking, so I spent a lot of my life with broken bones, and it was always a little funny, more worth the payoff (entertainment, a story to tell) than not.
So, of course, I loved Jackass. Over the years — particularly postcollege nighttime hangouts when you show your pals memorable videos from your childhood — I rewatched my favorite clips a lot. I came to see the gang as friends, like your older brother’s buddies who are insane and off-putting but also weirdly protective of you. Except, of course, Johnny Knoxville, who I was straight up in love with, and still am. The dreamy host with heavenly abs and a heavy Southern accent had been my crush since I caught a glimpse of him saying “Welcome to Jackass” as I flipped channels past MTV in the 2000s.
During my miscarriage rewatch, I was in a lot of pain — not as much as Johnny when he was assailed by paintballs for a Rolling Stone cover or when he acquiesced to letting children kick him the groin for a “cup test” — though I genuinely would have preferred it. The kookiness of the gang’s antics distracted me from the worst feeling of all: isolation.
I couldn’t text my friends; they didn’t know. You’re not supposed to tell them about your pregnancy until 12 weeks, lest they, you know, have to find out about your miscarriage. I couldn’t talk to my parents because the thought of familial love smashed me to pieces. I tried watching Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, but they’re all moms. I found myself triggered by the faces of people I loved, remembering how they used to be babies. This somehow did not apply to the perpetually adolescent Jackass boys.
I especially couldn’t retreat online. On Instagram, someone’s always debuting a new baby. Days before I lost my pregnancy, I had just relented to allow my algorithms to show me things about it. I had spent 32 years avoiding this state, terrified of becoming a mom before I was ready. That is to say, emotionally stable with a good enough job and a reasonably sized apartment. I had barely relented to my innate desire to be a mother — made all the internal compromises about where I’d be able to live in New York City, how I’d be far away from my family, what my friends would think of this huge step, how much it would cost and how I’d be able to maintain my already fragile mental stability — when I had it ripped away from me.
The most helpful TikTok posts for me during the period I knew I was pregnant were about how isolating the first trimester can be. The 500 people who liked those hyperspecific posts had no one to tell, save our parents, partners and the friends who clocked that we weren’t drinking. That’s why I felt the chaotic, bro-y realm of Jackass so comforting — it was several worlds away from the new maternal territory I’d just been rejected from. I just kept watching men hurt themselves for fun, through increasingly stupid and sometimes homoerotic rituals.
When it was becoming clear that I could only sink so far into the couch, my husband, glued to my side and battling his own grief, took me by the hand, out of the house and into the hallowed halls of the nearest AMC theater to see the only form of entertainment I could tolerate: Jackass: Best and Last, the latest (and perhaps final movie) of the franchise.
I had been looking forward to seeing it as close to its premiere as possible. I was wearing Jackass Forever merch that said “If You’re Gonna Be Dumb, You Gotta Be Tough” on the front, emblazoned with a skull crossed by crutches instead of bones, when the ultrasound confirmed the precious, lentil-size clump of cells I’d been calling sweet pea had no heartbeat. We didn’t know why, and we never would. I felt the furthest thing from tough.
Jackass: Best and Last, was, as all five other movies in the franchise are, a delightful smorgasbord of guys hurting each other, then hugging. This one — supposedly the last, but the one before it was supposed to be as well — was particularly nostalgic, showing some of the franchise’s greatest hits (and the pranks that got them into trouble). For instance, MTV didn’t really like the prank in which the boys put Johnny in a cardboard box and pushed him down the stairs — too replicable. Los Angeles really didn’t like it when he dressed up like an escaped convict and asked unsuspecting hardware store employees to lend him a hacksaw. That got them (until very recently) banned from West Hollywood.
There were tons of women in the theater with me, and I’ve always been charmed by how much that demographic loves the show. It’s hard not to think of things in a gendered way when you’re going through one of those experiences unique to people with uteruses while watching male genitalia-based humor play out on the big screen. Amid all the d***-and-ball jokes and gross-out body humor, Jackass has always secretly been heartwarming. The bros are not hurting anyone who’s not consenting to it, and they openly express their pain instead of holding it. Best and Last also confronts the fact that the bros are aging — they can no longer risk concussions like they would, and they have to get prostate exams now (in the film, Steve-O submits to one from a robot, and I don’t even want to tell you what happens during a game of Twister inspired by colonoscopies).
I never would have willingly subjected myself to feelings of warmth while buried so deep in my grief, but the boys of Jackass tricked me. I laughed, with my whole body and my aching guts and my broken heart, through the whole 90 minutes of the film. That opened me up to the warmth of their friendship, the quiet melancholy of aging out of what you love and the freedom of letting yourself get hurt. Their memories will long outlast their injuries, and their bonds have spanned decades.
In the quiet of the dark theater, I thought to myself, as I have a million times before watching these men hurt themselves for sport, “That’s so stupid.” You have to admire their courage. I’m never going to trick my pals into doing an escape room that deploys all their worst fears, but life involves so much risk-taking that might result in pain.
It’s not really a secret that pregnancy and childbirth are also pretty much nonstop body horror, from morning sickness to labor. I spent many of my brief pregnant days violently nauseous — not puking up a live goldfish like Steve-O, but surrendering my body to unknown trials I just have to believe I can overcome. I haven’t made it close enough to motherhood to turn this all into a metaphor about suffering for the expansive, life-altering love of a child. I just know that anything worth having is worth hurting for: male friendship, a really funny video, a legacy and so on.
Though I’ve spent much of the last week thinking about how I’d prefer to get tackled by a professional football player, pushed through a maze of tasers or blasted away on a rocket rather than endure another second of miscarrying, I’m going to try again, and I’m going to keep trying until a medical professional says I can’t — just like my good friend Johnny Knoxville, who’s not allowed to irritate bulls anymore. Taking that risk is far more rewarding than, say, letting yourself get bodied by an animal in exchange for entertaining movie footage, but it’s still inherently risky to step out of the safe zone. I so appreciate the distraction of Jackass, but more than that, I needed the reminder that if you’re going to be dumb, you’ve got to be tough.
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