It's been more than a decade since the release of Jackass 3D, the third movie in the hit franchise. The stunt comedy used technical achievements in three-dimensional screenings and slow footage Phantom cameras to capture images such as flying dildos, jet-ski crashes and a guy farting into a New Year's Eve party horn.
Stuntman and comedian Steve-o says he never thought he'd see the release of a film like Jackass Forever.
"I was fucking sure that that ship had sailed," says Steve-o, also known as Stephen Glover. "I didn't think there's a chance in hell, and when it did happen, I thought man, like OK. I wasn't worried if I had it in me because I'm doing crazy shit on my own, but collectively, I thought it would be kind of creepy to watch.
"That's the first joke in my Bucket List [standup tour] show. I'm Steve-o in my 40s. I'm, like, hurry it up before this gets creepy."
Thankfully, his fears have been proven wrong. The demand for Jackass has never been higher; the fourth movie topped the box office on its opening weekend. Steve-o also almost sold out The Factory in Deep Ellum for his two-show Friday night spot on his tour.
Steve-o's latest live show combines two of his biggest passions: standup comedy and doing painfully funny stunts. The latter is for his audience's wincing amusement and to fulfill his own natural need for attention and entertainment. He's been doing stand-up for 11 years and has realized his first show was filled with stories from his past, so he wanted to explore some new territory on his latest show.
"I realized, oh my God, I have so many of these stories I'm telling that happened on video," Steve-o says. "Then my head exploded."
The Bucket List show features Steve-o's honed stage comedy mixed with a multimedia showcase featuring some of his greatest and newest attempts to push his threshold of pain in the pursuit of laughs.
"I thought I was coming off as depressing the way all of my standup was about regaling my past and I felt like it was getting kind of dark — like the guy who couldn't stop bragging about how much he could bench press in high school," Steve-o says. "I wanted the live show to have the benefit of the multimedia."
The comedian says his latest collection of stunts addresses some of his biggest fears and are designed to push him to the limit. One bit was inspired by a childhood joke about the definition of "macho" being a man who jogs home from his vasectomy ... and you can probably guess where it goes from there.
"I remember that joke, and I hung on to it," Steve-o says. "I grew up with the idea of getting a vasectomy and doing a whole lot more than jogging. I call it the vasectomy Olympics."
With the new show, Steve-o faces one of his biggest fears in a way that even Jackass wouldn't be allowed to show without a NC-17 rating. It's a fear he explored at the end of the third Jackass movie with the Poo-Cocktail Supreme stunt in which he's strapped into a port-a-potty filled with shit that's slingshot into the air from bungee cords attached to two large cranes.
"I went about filming all new stuff and I wanted it to be crazier stuff than ever and that worked out pretty conveniently because I had a handful of ideas, which really weren't new but they were so absurd they were never supposed to happen," he says.
It's more impressive when you realize that Steve-o does all of these painful, stupid things to his body without prescription painkillers. The stunt comic struggled with addiction to alcohol and drugs for years, which fueled his desire for reckless behavior. But he's been sober for 13 years.
"I never once in my life took a painkiller for pain," Steve-o says. "It was just about getting fucked up and taking them with booze to get more fucked up and what drives me in anything I do is this overdeveloped need for attention. If you take away the drugs and alcohol, I'm just a sober attention whore."
People are still happy to pay Steve-o lots of attention — as is clear by the success of the latest Jackass movie and the fact that he's upgraded to concert stages with his standup act. He wants to do the same with his stunts no matter the cost. Steve-o says he has an idea to get fake breast implants for his next Gone Too Far tour.
"It's a blessing and a curse," Steve-o says. "I think, fuck man, it's so great to put together this show that I can never outdo and I really felt that way strongly about the Bucket List tour that this was the ultimate and it left me nowhere to go, but my wheels have been spinning and I came up with the Gone Too Far tour. The Bucket List tour has ideas of things that everybody thought were like, 'Oh my God, that's crazy,' where the Gone Too Far tour, everybody who hears them tries to aggressively talk me out of doing them."
Either way, he's still driven to being the best idiot he can be for his fans and crowds.
"I'm just an ambitious kid," Steve-o says. "I'm a big-time attention whore and nothing's ever enough. Here I've made this huge leap to theaters and all I can think is that I wanna make the huge leap to areas. I think that's the addict in me."