**This article was originally published for The Long Middle on Substack**

A buddy sent me a tweet last week about the new Jackass film… it made me very nostalgic. It’s another movie I’ll probably never watch, but at least with this one I am VERY familiar with the whole ecosystem.

I’m sure at this point everyone has heard of Jackass, but here’s the quick overview. Starting in late 2000, Jeff Tremaine, Johnny Knoxville, and Spike Jonze (yes, that Spike Jonze) put together a compilation of stunts and pranks that grew into a whole media franchise: spinoffs like Viva La Bam and Wildboyz, six feature films with Paramount, some video games, and on and on.

Outside of white millennial men, pretty much everybody else hated it: for the limit-pushing, the indecency, and the very real chance of reproducing and mimicking it’s dangerous stunts.

Potty humor + cringe stunts + shock pranks = “Welcome to Jackass.”

Yet, here we are, saying farewell to the Johnny Knoxville’s and the Jackasses. And for whatever it’s worth, at least it all happened in the real world, where every stunt was born out of pure boredom.

As the tweet put it, you don’t taser a friend’s groin if you’ve got a magic dopamine box in your pocket feeding you a hit every few seconds. You do it because it’s a Tuesday in 2005, nothing is happening, and somebody has to break the monotony, even if breaking it means launching a buddy in a shopping cart into the hedges outside an Episcopalian church. I mean, am I right?

But now, in 2026, the JA-clowns strike me as sad in the previews. They know they can’t gamble with their 50-plus-year-old bodies anymore, and worse, I bet they know it wouldn’t be worth it if they could. A giant boxing glove to Wee Man’s face used to make 50 million people laugh for years. Today, it would buy you an hour before the feed forgets his name.

These were men who would have done this stunts to the death, if only we’d asked them to. They still don’t seem scared. They just look sad. The cultural values shifted underneath them. As the tweet put it, they became “shoguns in a world that doesn’t need them.”

Their theme song, that lonesome telecaster twang, is “Corona” by the Minutemen, a sad song about American greed and excess hollowing out Latin America. The same appetite that strip-mines a country for whatever it can take is the appetite that used these men up for our entertainment and now scrolls right past them.

We consume and move on.

And that same machine, in its newest form, is quietly doing it to the rest of us, hollowing us out a swipe at a time. Of course the clowns are sad! The show is over, and the crowd already left…

Ultimately, I don’t think Jackass was ever really about just the stunts. I think it was a rite of passage that a whole generation of boys needed to build for themselves, out of the only broken parts they could find.

I think about this quite often: What initiations did I/we have growing up? Boy Scouts was dying out (I was forced out of Boy Scouts anyway, but that’s a story for another day). There was no war most of us believed in, except for those few months after 9/11 when we all got fired up and patriotic on steriods. Most of us didn’t have an older man who took it as his job to pull us across the line into manhood on purpose.

So, a bunch of kids improvised the whole thing from scratch, using shopping carts and bottle rockets and each other’s bodies. It was a formation ritual with all the formation scraped out. Just the danger, and the brotherhood, and the manic laughing.

And this is why the movie feels more like a funeral.

I am part of the hinge generation. Mine is the last that remembers the before. We had a childhood outside. We had boredom: the real, bottomless kind that eventually forces you to invent something. And then we stood there and watched the dopamine box (re: the smartphone) show up and swallow every bit of it.

I lived through dial-up in my formative years. And as I hold this techbox in my hand right now, this second, I still from time to time slow down enough to mourn what it did to us.

We’re not the elders who never logged on.

We’re not the kids who were born already inside the feed.

We’re the ones who watched transition happen, live.

And witnessed what was taken, one piece at a time. First, the culture took the rite of passage and a cause worth bleeding for, so boys improvised one out of shopping carts. Then, it came back and took the improvised version too, and slid a screen across the table instead. Every trade off seemed like an upgrade. Most of them were a trojan horse with loneliness climbing out the other side.

Say whatever you want about the stunts, but these idiots had each other. They were crazy together: outside, in the daylight, with their friends. The kid with the dope-box is sad by himself, in the dark, at 2am, a thousand strangers watching and not one arm wrapped around his shoulder. That’s the one thing the dope-box can never do: hand you a physical hand to place on your shoulder.

I’m trying my best to not sit here and be nostalgic. Nostalgia is a bit of a trap. A lot of the old days were worse than they seem. So, the question isn’t whether it was better back then, the question is what grown men are supposed to do now that we can name exactly what we lost back then.

Millennial men are the only ones who remember enough to name it and are still young enough to do something about it. The older men can’t see it. The younger men can never understand what was there.

I don’t need another Jackass reboot. It’s over. But I do want to get outside of the control of a screen… Get bored on purpose. Put my body somewhere it can actually feel something. Get my real friends, the flesh-and-blood ones, in the same room, and make something dumb and real with my hands, because we might be the last men who still remember that you can, and also willing enough to show younger guys they can too.

The saddest clown at the rodeo isn’t the one who gets tossed by the bull. It’s the one still standing in the empty arena after the crowd has gone home, in the makeup, not sure what he is anymore once there’s nobody left to make laugh.

We still have plenty of imitators, though. YouTube is full of guys chasing the same fame off the same idea. But the ones today never full send it, and they’re a worse version of it.

Jackass was already a cheap version of Evel Knievel, and the shock YouTubers of now are a cheap version of Jackass, a photocopy of a photocopy, fainter every time. Knievel bet his life for a packed stadium. Jackass bet their bodies for their friend’s laughter. YouTube guys risk little, alone, for strangers who’ll forget them in one swipe.

Nobody actually likes a jackass in real life. But we could sure use a few more men crazy enough to do something in real life, in the daylight, with their friends close enough to show that they care.