If you're a grownup of a certain not-so-advanced age, there's nothing to make you feel ready for the cultural glue factory like MTV's stunt-comedy show Jackass. You see its young male pranksters riding and crashing shopping carts; getting turned upside down in a sloshingly full portable toilet; swallowing a goldfish and puking it into a bowl; dressing up like a disabled person and getting pushed off a wheelchair. And you think--and you know how this sounds even as you think it--This is funny?
Which is to say, you have entered the environs of Knoxville--as in Jackass star Johnny Knoxville, the alias of P.J. Clapp, 29, who started on the road to fame by sending MTV a video in which he had himself gassed with pepper spray and shot with a Taser. (He and MTV agreed not to air a segment of the video in which he put on a bulletproof vest and shot himself.) And if you're nonplussed--and maybe a tad defensive about being nonplussed ("But I'm cool! I liked Beavis and Butt-Head!")--Knoxville is doing his job. The show is succeeding well enough without you to capture more than 2 million young viewers a week.
Knoxville could be the poster child for the Rude Boy phenomenon: the gross, aggressive, self-mutilating young-male mode of rebellion du jour that is crashing its shopping cart head on into the mainstream. Jackass is the most successful cable launch of the season. Gross-out comedy rules at the movie box office and online, where Web animators exploit the Internet's seemingly limitless tolerance for vomit and poop jokes (for instance, at Doodie.com) This weekend NBC and UPN start airing the XFL, a football league created by the World Wrestling Federation's Vince McMahon and designed for ultraviolence (fair catches aren't allowed, but roughing the passer is). The G.O.P. courted the Rude Boy vote by putting the WWF wrestler the Rock onstage at its 2000 convention. And after selling more than 11 million copies of The Marshall Mathers LP, rapper Eminem not only garnered a best-album Grammy nomination for his tales of homophobia and misogynist violence, but he may even perform at the Feb. 21 awards show.