Kicked in the Groin for Twenty-Five Years: A Complete Breakdown of the Jackass Franchise

There is no easy way to explain Jackass to someone who never watched it. You can describe the premise: a group of men filming themselves getting hurt, on purpose, repeatedly, for two and a half decades. You can list the stunts: bee-sting limousines, wasabi enemas, chainsaw juggling, a man on fire riding a bike. None of it quite captures why it mattered, why it lasted, or why a franchise built entirely on physical pain and public humiliation became one of the most influential and beloved comedy properties of the 21st century.

Twenty-five years after Johnny Knoxville first got pepper-sprayed on camera for our entertainment, Jackass is still going. The newest and reportedly final film in the series, jackass: best and last, has just arrived, prompting a genuine moment of reflection on a franchise that nobody, including the people who made it, ever expected to last this long or matter this much.

Here is the complete story of Jackass: how it started, everything it became, why it worked, and what it left behind.

The Origins: A Skateboard Magazine and a Bad Idea

Jackass began with Jeff Tremaine, editor of the underground skateboarding magazine Big Brother, hiring a young actor named Johnny Knoxville for a piece on self-defense methods. Knoxville’s spin on the assignment was to try each method personally, on himself, with predictably painful and unpredictably hilarious results. Tremaine and Knoxville filmed it, and the result convinced them they were onto something.

Around the same time, Bam Margera and his skateboarding crew, known as CKY, or Camp Kill Yourself, were filming their own stunts and pranks independently, and their footage found its way to Big Brother’s offices. Dave England and Jason “Wee Man” Acuña also had ties to the magazine through its editorial and publishing sides. Steve-O had been mailing tapes to the magazine trying to get featured. All of these disparate threads, skateboarding culture, underground video culture, and a shared appetite for pain as entertainment, converged into a single idea.

Spike Jonze, already an established music video director, joined Tremaine and Knoxville, and the trio pitched the concept to several networks. Saturday Night Live reportedly considered making the group a recurring segment before passing. A subsequent bidding war between Comedy Central, FX, and MTV ended with MTV winning the rights, offering a half-hour weekly show and, crucially, significant creative control.

The Original Series: Three Seasons That Changed Everything (2000 to 2002)

Jackass premiered on MTV on October 1, 2000, and ran for three seasons until February 2002, with reruns extending into that year. The cast, ten strong, included Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Dave England, Ryan Dunn, Ehren “Danger Ehren” McGhehey, Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, Preston Lacy, and Brandon DiCamillo.

The show drew ratings records on Sunday nights and immediately became a cultural lightning rod. It was, in the most literal sense, an R-rated version of America’s Funniest Home Videos, except the home videos were staged, the injuries were real, and the people getting hurt had chosen it deliberately and repeatedly. The show’s mixture of skateboarding culture, stuntman risk-taking, and sketch comedy timing was genuinely unlike anything on television.

It was also, from the beginning, deeply controversial. Politicians took notice. Former Senator Joe Lieberman campaigned to have the show cancelled after a 13-year-old boy and his friend suffered injuries attempting to recreate a stunt that had set Knoxville on fire on screen. MTV executives grew increasingly uneasy watching young viewers get hospitalized trying to imitate what they saw, and the network began pushing for reduced stunt severity and increased censorship.

Rather than compromise the show’s creative vision, Tremaine, Knoxville, and the cast made the decision to walk away from the series after just three seasons. It was a short run for a show that would generate a media franchise lasting the next quarter century.

The Movies: Six Films and Counting

Jackass: The Movie (2002)

Released just months after the television series concluded, Jackass: The Movie was conceived as the crew’s farewell to fans. Shot on a reported budget of around $5 million, the film allowed the group to circumvent television censorship entirely, and the results earned an R rating and considerably more freedom to push the stunts further than MTV had ever allowed. The film was a genuine box office phenomenon, earning more than $64 million domestically against its minuscule budget, proving that the television show’s cancellation had done nothing to diminish the audience’s appetite for what the crew was selling.

Jackass Number Two (2006)

Four years passed before the crew reunited, and the circumstances were notable. During the final season of the spinoff Wildboyz, Knoxville joined former castmates Chris Pontius and Steve-O on increasingly extreme stunts, to the point that director Jeff Tremaine reportedly pulled Knoxville aside and asked why they weren’t just getting everyone together for another movie. With Viva La Bam and Wildboyz both wrapping up, the full cast was available, and Jackass Number Two arrived in theaters on September 22, 2006, topping the box office in its debut weekend with $29 million.

The film also became linked to real-world controversy: footage featuring Bam Margera’s uncle, Vincent “Don Vito” Margera, was removed from the theatrical and DVD releases following his arrest and subsequent conviction on two counts of sexual assault on a minor, a stark reminder that the extended Jackass family’s off-camera lives did not always match the show’s comedic tone.

Jackass 3D (2010)

The third film embraced the 3D format that was dominating theaters at the time, and Paramount screened early footage at San Diego Comic-Con 2010, allowing fans direct access to the crew ahead of release. The film continued the franchise’s commercial momentum and pushed the format’s novelty into genuinely inventive stunt design, using the added dimensionality for gags that the earlier films could never have attempted.

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013)

This is the outlier of the franchise, and its most creatively significant entry. Rather than another compilation of stunts and pranks performed as themselves, Bad Grandpa gave Knoxville a fictional character, elderly con man Irving Zisman, and a loose narrative structure involving a road trip with his troublemaking grandson. The concept had its roots in a Jackass: The Movie bit where Knoxville and Spike Jonze donned elaborate old-age makeup, expanded here into a full feature.

Bad Grandpa is the first and only Jackass film to receive an Academy Award nomination, earning a nod for Best Makeup and Hairstyling in 2014. It represents the clearest evidence that underneath the crude stunts, the Jackass creative team had genuine filmmaking ambition and technical skill that occasionally broke through the chaos.

Jackass Forever (2022)

Sixteen years after Number Two and nine years after Bad Grandpa, the crew returned for Jackass Forever, which introduced a new generation of cast members including Rachel Wolfson, the first woman to become a full cast member in the franchise’s history. The film was a genuine critical and commercial success, praised for balancing nostalgia for the original crew with legitimate new energy from the incoming performers.

Bam Margera’s absence from Jackass Forever became one of the more publicly difficult chapters in the franchise’s history. Margera was fired from the production amid a contract dispute connected to his ongoing struggles with substance abuse, and the fallout led to a public and painful rift with Knoxville and Tremaine, including litigation. Margera does not appear in new footage in the film, though archival material featuring him was retained.

jackass: best and last (2025)

Billed as the franchise’s final film, best and last arrives as a genuine send-off, incorporating archival footage of Margera despite his estrangement from the production and reportedly extending an invitation to him for the premiere, itself a sign that some of the wounds between Margera and his former collaborators may be healing with time. The film functions as both a culmination of everything the franchise has built and an acknowledgment of its own mortality, twenty-five years after Knoxville first got pepper-sprayed on camera.

The Spinoffs: An Entire Extended Universe of Pain

The Jackass franchise’s television footprint extends well beyond the original series, spawning a genuine constellation of spinoffs that gave individual cast members their own platforms.

Wildboyz (2003 to 2006) paired Chris Pontius and Steve-O for a globe-trotting series that rejected the standard prank formula in favor of wildlife encounters. The show sent the pair around the world to interact with exotic and dangerous animals, dressing as zebras to infiltrate a lion’s den, allowing themselves to be stung by emperor scorpions, and swimming with great white sharks while dressed as seals. Wildboyz featured recurring guest appearances from Knoxville and Wee Man and pushed the franchise’s relationship with physical danger into genuinely different territory than pranks and stunts.

Viva La Bam (2003 to 2005) gave Bam Margera his own reality-adjacent show built around his daily life, his complicated relationship with his parents, his uncle Don Vito, and a rotating cast of guest stars, running for roughly 40 mostly scripted episodes. It was the show that most directly translated the CKY sensibility, Margera’s pre-Jackass skating and prank crew, into standalone television.

Homewrecker (2005) was hosted by the late Ryan Dunn and followed a Trading Spaces-style format with a twist: Dunn would renovate the room of someone who had pulled a memorable prank, but with vengeful modifications reflecting the original prank. The show lasted a single season on MTV.

Dr. Steve-O (2007) aired on USA Network and featured Steve-O helping ordinary men overcome their fears through a series of escalating challenges, built around the tagline “turning wussies into men.” It represented one of the earliest attempts to translate a single Jackass personality into a standalone hosting vehicle outside the MTV ecosystem.

Bam’s Unholy Union followed Margera and his then-fiancée Missy Rothstein in the buildup to their wedding, continuing the reality television direction his career had taken following Viva La Bam’s conclusion. Blastazoid gave Brandon DiCamillo and Rake Yohn a short-lived show about video games. The crew also hosted Radio Bam on Sirius XM from 2004 until 2013, extending the franchise’s presence into audio media for nearly a decade.

None of the spinoffs fully captured the specific chemistry of the original show or its CKY predecessor, but collectively they demonstrate how thoroughly the Jackass ecosystem embedded itself into MTV’s programming identity throughout the 2000s.

Why It Was So Popular: The Alchemy Behind the Chaos

Understanding why Jackass connected with audiences requires looking past the surface-level shock value to the specific things the show and its films were actually doing.

It was a genuine study in male friendship. Beneath the crude stunts and the nudity, Jackass was fundamentally about a group of men who loved each other enough to inflict and endure enormous pain purely for one another’s amusement and the audience’s entertainment. That underlying dynamic, subversive in its embrace of intimate physical and emotional male friendship at a time when mainstream media rarely depicted men that way, has continued to earn praise from new generations of viewers discovering the franchise. It is not incidental that the crew brought that same energy to a float in the West Hollywood Pride Parade decades later, with cast member Rachel Wolfson noting plainly on social media that “Jackass has and will always be gay” in response to critics of the appearance.

It tapped into something psychologically real. In a pre-social media world, Jackass offered a fascinating, if unintentional, study of the bystander effect: the social psychology phenomenon in which individuals in a group are less likely to intervene in a situation than someone witnessing it alone, because everyone assumes someone else will act. Watching the cast stand by while one member set himself on fire, or refuse to help another who genuinely needed assistance mid-stunt, gave audiences an unfiltered look at group dynamics that felt uncomfortably true even as it was staged for comedy.

The range of the humor was genuinely wide. The best part of Jackass’s transgressions was how they ran the gamut from mild to absurd to shockingly extreme, sometimes within the same episode. One moment could be gentle, almost whimsical physical comedy. The next could be genuinely difficult to watch. That unpredictability kept the show and films from ever feeling formulaic, even across twenty-five years and six feature films.

It was fundamentally, unmistakably real. Unlike scripted comedy, the pain in Jackass was not simulated. The reactions were not acted. When someone got hurt, they were actually hurt, and the audience’s laughter was inseparable from a kind of visceral, empathetic wince. That authenticity, impossible to fake and increasingly rare in an entertainment landscape that would eventually become dominated by heavily produced reality television, was central to the show’s appeal from the very beginning.

The Pop Culture Effect: What Jackass Actually Changed

Jackass’s influence on the broader media landscape is difficult to overstate, even though it rarely gets the credit it deserves for reshaping entertainment in the decades since.

It invented a genre. Jackass is widely credited as the birth of extreme reality television, laying direct groundwork for shows like Fear Factor and Naked and Afraid. The echoes are specific and traceable: Steve-O swallowing and vomiting up a live goldfish anticipated the gross-out food challenges that would define Fear Factor’s format, while the Jackass cast’s comfort with extended nudity during dangerous stunts preceded the premise of Naked and Afraid by more than a decade.

It predicted viral video culture before viral video culture existed. As internet access spread through American households in the years following Jackass’s MTV run, the show inspired countless viewers to attempt filming their own lo-fi stunt videos, chasing a version of the fame and notoriety the cast had achieved. This happened in a genuinely pre-YouTube era, which makes Jackass’s influence on what would eventually become an entire internet ecosystem of homemade stunt and prank content genuinely prescient. The show effectively predicted an entire mode of internet culture before the platforms that would host it were built.

It shaped an entire subculture of music and fashion. The Jackass effect rippled through early 2000s pop-punk, with numerous bands of the era, including genre stalwarts like blink-182 and Simple Plan, adopting an aesthetic and comedic sensibility that drew visibly from the Jackass playbook of juvenile chaos married to genuine emotional sincerity. The crossover between skate culture, pop-punk, and Jackass’s specific brand of humor helped define an entire strand of early-2000s youth culture.

It proved that authenticity and danger could be sustainably monetized. Long before extreme sports content, reaction videos, and stunt-based social media influencers became an entire economic category, Jackass demonstrated that audiences would show up repeatedly, across television, film, and eventually a video game, for the specific pleasure of watching real people voluntarily endure real pain for entertainment. That business model, in various forms, underlies enormous portions of the current internet content economy. Remember this was one of the first shows that had to place a warning at the beginning of every episodes and movie telling people to NOT send in content of people doing stupidly dangerous things to them.

Where They Are Now: The Cast a Quarter Century Later

Johnny Knoxville has remained the franchise’s most visible ambassador, expanding into film roles including The Dukes of Hazzard, The Ringer, and voicing Leonardo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, alongside a brief run in WWE and a podcast, all while continuing to anchor every Jackass film through Forever and Best and Last.

Steve-O has been sober for well over a decade following treatment he has publicly credited with saving his life, and has built a substantial career as a stand-up comedian and internet personality independent of the franchise. Chris Pontius has continued acting in film and television, including appearances in Somewhere, What We Do Is Secret, Game Over Man!, and Action Point alongside Knoxville. Jason “Wee Man” Acuña found success in reality television with Armed and Famous and Celebrity Circus, and became a franchisee of the Southern California taco chain Chronic Tacos.

Ryan Dunn’s story ends in tragedy. On June 20, 2011, Dunn was killed in a car crash while driving under the influence, along with passenger Zachary Hartwell. Knoxville’s tribute at the time captured the loss in devastatingly plain terms: “I’m just very sad because I lost my brother and my world got about 134 percent less funny.” Dunn’s memory remains woven throughout the franchise’s identity, and his absence is still felt in every subsequent project.

Bam Margera’s post-Jackass years have been the franchise’s most publicly painful story, marked by sustained struggles with substance abuse, multiple stints in rehab, his firing from Jackass Forever amid contract disputes, and a subsequent legal battle with Knoxville and Tremaine. His appearance in archival footage in Best and Last, and reports of an invitation extended to him for the film’s premiere, suggest the door has not been permanently closed on reconciliation.

Twenty-Five Years Later

Jackass should not, by any conventional measure of media longevity, still matter in 2026. It was a niche, controversial, frequently condemned cable television show that ran for less than two years before its own creators walked away from it. And yet it produced six theatrical films, a constellation of spinoffs, a genuine and lasting influence on multiple television genres and internet culture broadly, an Academy Award nomination, and a fanbase that has followed the crew from their twenties into middle age.

What Jackass actually offered, underneath the pain and the crude humor and the controversy, was something genuinely rare: a group of friends who loved each other enough to do anything for a laugh, filmed with a sincerity that never once tried to be anything other than exactly what it was. That honesty, more than any individual stunt, is why the franchise endured long enough to say a proper goodbye.

Best and last, indeed. But twenty-five years is a very long last kick to the groin.

What’s your favorite Jackass stunt or spinoff? Drop it in the comments — bonus points if you can still watch it without wincing.