Don Harris, executive vice president of distribution for Paramount Pictures, says one of his associates – a published author and certified grown-up – refused to watch “Jackass: Number Two” in the Paramount screening room.
He closed his door and watched it by himself.
But not, says Harris, because he expected to find it disgusting, crude and revolting.
“It was because he didn’t want anyone to see him laughing” at something that was disgusting, crude and revolting.
That’s the problem with “Jackass: Number Two” for those of us who instinctively want to say popular culture can’t get any more brain-dead than this.
When a movie’s idea of a good laugh is to have a character coax bodily fluids from a horse and drink them, most comedy-loving citizens would probably say its joke well has gone dry.
But then you go into a theater showing “Jackass” and the crowd is laughing itself silly.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Harris. “It’s like a rock concert.”
Harsh, inconvenient and unavoidable truth: When it comes to funny, no one gets to make the call for everyone else.
You or I might like to send all these convulsed teenage boys back to the eighth century, where they’d probably get along well with the Visigoths.
But they’re the target audience of “Jackass: Number Two,” and if they think it’s funny, which they do, it’s funny.
If eating “road apples” or sticking a fish hook through your cheek isn’t your idea of funny, ya don’t buy a ticket. It’s no more complex than that.
Sure, “Jackass” pushes slapstick to a more graphic level than the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis or Chevy Chase. But slapstick is still slapstick, a blunt form of comedy that has always appealed to a certain segment of the laughing population.
Me, I never cared about the Three Stooges. But I love the Marx Brothers, whose act was also sprinkled with slapstick. So where does crude stupidity end and brilliant social satire begin? For me, somewhere between Moe and Groucho.
For you, somewhere else.
Harris, who says it’s fair to call “Jackass” the Three Stooges of the MTV generation, says his personal cinematic reference point for crude, laugh-out-loud humor has always been “Blazing Saddles.”
“But if I were a few years younger,” he says, “it might have been ‘Animal House.’ A few years younger than that, and maybe it would have been ‘American Pie.” The history of popular culture, let’s face it, is an unbroken chain of older folks saying “That’s not funny” or “Turn that garbage off” to younger folks.
Followed by younger folks ignoring them and sorting it out for themselves.
