jackflop 5
thoughts on bam’s recent posts
Credit: Bam
People are kind of weird about Bam. Between most of Jackass ignoring him and the Reddit page dedicated to dissecting every single thing he does/says/posts/posts again, people just can’t seem to be normal about him. And I strive to be normal. On this blog, I don’t want to walk delicately around a complicated guy, I think that’s insulting, but I want to be thoughtful about his difficult lived experiences, whether that be his addictions or simply acknowledging the ramifications of his early stardom. Most importantly, I just want to be honest and accurate with what I write on here, because I’ve been told that democracy dies in darkness without Jackass World.
So, the reason for the season. Over the weekend, Bam posted a black and white video to his Instagram about some rando “bloke” asking him if he was going to star in Jackass 5. It’s a total hypothetical, it’s not like Jackass 5 exists, but nevertheless, the question seems to have really stuck a thorn in Bam’s side and he took it to Instagram to rant.
Humble reader, I am sure you remember this, but if not, Bam is not a stranger to an Instagram rant. Going back to when he was originally supposed to be in Jackass Forever but was cut from the production very publicly, he took his frustration to Instagram and posted fairly relentlessly about how he was wronged and didn’t need the franchise but also Please Give Me Another Chance.
So now, like 5 years later, he’s taking it to Instagram again. But instead of being upset about not being in Jackass Forever, now Bam is scoffing at the thought of being included in a theoretical Jackass 5. In the video, he rails against Forever, swinging for Johnny Knoxville below the belt by saying the Forever stunts were unimaginative and replicable. He then turns on the new cast, specifically Jasper Dolphin and his father, clearly upset as someone who made a living off stunts with his father for almost two decades. This is, of course, just comparative on paper. I don’t remember Bam’s dad ever doing something as gnarly as jumping out of a plane like Jasper’s dad does in Jackass 4.5. Anyway, after all that, Bam ends by saying they should call it the next installment, “Jackflop 5.”
I’ll be honest, Jackflop 5 got a laugh out of me. Several times.
To his credit, while he isn’t technically in Jackass Forever, Bam certainly haunts the whole movie. There’s awkward cuts, weird replacements for roles that were clearly his, and a general lack of skateboarding, I could go on. To make matters personally worse, the Silence of the Lambs stunt was originally called Silence of the Bam and Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine both say it’s the funniest thing they ever recorded, only for it to never be released. It is my white whale. In fact, the only footage of Bam in the movie is during the marching band stunt when he briefly marches by, falls, and then panickedly offers a hand to a very injured Steve-O. My point is that he isn’t wrong, his exclusion from Jackass Forever is noticeable, and he is crucial to the structure of the whole thing, but that didn’t make Jackass Forever bad.
Credit: Dickhouse Productions, Paramount Pictures.
Machine Gun Kelly made Jackass Forever bad.
In historic Bam fashion, one post wasn’t enough, because he popped back up again a day later to bring up the hypothetical fifth Jackass again, but this time, I think he made an actually pretty good point. In his second video with his thick Delco accent, Bam says that any future Jackass installment would be “missing the Ass,” in that the CKY crew is currently very absent from the overall picture of the franchise. Bam stipulates that without the CKY side — Dunn, DiCo, Rake, April Margera, Phil Margera, and himself — it’s just a Big Brother movie.
And I think he’s right!
I’ve written at length here about the Origin Of Jackass being the time Johnny Knoxville shot himself on camera. And it is in the sense that it’s when Tremaine and Spike Jonze saw a vision for a new comedy show. But at the same time, they were filming stunts for Big Brother tapes, Bam and his friends were independently filming their own movies for CKY (Camp Kill Yourself) across the country.
Isolated in Pennsylvania, CKY — namely Bam, Ryan Dunn, Raab Himself, Rake Yohn, and Brandon DiCamillo — pretty much invented stunt/prank YouTube channels as you know them now by self-releasing the CKY tapes to the country. At this point, Bam was already pretty popular, and these VHS tapes just launched his career. Bam’s specific style of DIY stunts mixed with public humiliation all with shockingly high production for essentially home videos matched what Knoxville and Tremaine were up to at Big Brother and when they were pitching to MTV, Bam (who was famous at this point) was an obvious collaborator. This was after Knoxville ripped some of Bam’s pranks for Big Brother of course.
So Jackass is ultimately a combination of Big Brother and CKY. And I think Bam is right in his structural assessment of the state of the franchise. It’s kind of a different entity now, based on the Big Brother crew and their friends rather than a joint partnership between two comedy groups and maybe more emotionally, two friend groups.
My thoughts on Jackflop 5? I think that it will happen because I think Knoxville won’t want to end the series until he gets Bam and the CKY crew back. Maybe I’m being too optimistic but I think Knoxville is legitimately a man who wants to do right by people as much as he is someone hellbent on his twisted artistry. I think he won’t feel like Jackass is done without one final appearance from the poster boy of the show himself.
I also think Bam’s totally lying. He would totally do Jackass 5. He likes it too much.