David Fear
Contact David Fear on X View all posts by David Fear June 25, 2026
Chris Pontius, Johnny Knoxville, and a very angry ram in 'Jackass: Best and Last.' Sean Cliver/Paramount Pictures Empires have risen and fallen via a single bullet. (Just ask Archduke Franz Ferdinand.) In this case, the shot was fired from a .38 caliber pistol in the California desert, on a warm day in January 1998. The finger on the trigger belonged to Philip John Clapp, better known by his stage name: Johnny Knoxville. He was also the victim. P.J., as his friends called him, was going to test out a bulletproof vest. He strapped on some Kevlar, stuffed some copies of Hustler under his shirt for extra “protection,” pointed the gun at his chest, and cycled through the revolver’s empty rounds, Russian-roulette style, until he engaged the live round. His friends captured the whole thing on their video camera. It was made for the skating magazine Big Brother, but the tape eventually helped Knoxville score a TV deal. The rest is history. The Jackass age had officially begun.
This infamous clip kicks off Jackass: Best and Last, the final go-round for Knoxville and his bruised, battered, and put-a-toy-car-up-your-butt friends — after the requisite disclaimer that you should not try these dumbass stunts at home, of course. It’s not the most shocking thing in the movie, though. That would be the edit that comes right after the sequence, which cuts from the baby-faced, 26-year-old kid in the videocam footage to a 54-year-old Knoxville, staring straight into the camera. He was already slouching toward middle age in 2022’s Jackass Forever. But going from the giggling kid who just took a self-inflicted bullet to the guy with fully gray hair and the lines on his face only underlines the decades of hard living and bull-related injuries that separates those two Knoxvilles. Dude has stared down angry steers, strapped himself to homemade rockets, shot himself out of a cannon, and recreated variations of this award-winning movie more times than you can count. There’s just one thing that our man in the red Converse All-Stars can’t out-prank: time.
So let us bid a fond farewell to Knoxville, and Steve-O, and Wee Man, and Sean “Poopies” McInerney, and Chris Pontius, and Chris Pontius’s penis. Parting is such sweet sorrow, but these guys aren’t going gently into the night just yet. They’re throwing themselves a proper retirement party, complete with booby-trapped escape rooms, naked Olympian competitions, and genital shock collars. Everyone in the Jackass gang is feeling their age now, which is why, instead of vignettes featuring boxing matches in department stores and pulling teeth via speeding sports cars, their new bits involve prostate exams and that stuff you drink before getting a colonoscopy. It’s just so much harder to bounce back from, say, a hangover or falling on a bed of hot coals in your fifties than it was in your twenties.
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Jackass: Best and Last is a victory lap for nearly 30 years of doing ridiculous, stupid, death-defying shit in the name of entertainment, a greatest-hits and outtakes compilation that’s buffered by a half dozen or so fresh hells that Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine put their sometimes-willing participants through. The format actually works better than you might think, given that the films have always just been feature-length collections of the stunts and double-dog dares that the crew concocted. The old blends and bleeds, literally, into the new, a through-line of gonzo fearlessness connects on era to the next, and that Poo Cocktail gag (emphasis on “gag”) is funny no matter how many times you see it. The move from TV to the big screen turned out to be key, however, because seeing all these self-harm sketches with an audience was a major upgrade. Laughing at Knoxville get bit in the nipple by a baby alligator with your friends in your living room was a gas. Laughing at that same clip with a hundred other people in a theater? A whole other, far superior experience.
