When Dante (“Inferno,” Canto XXII) wrote that “the captain made a trumpet of his ass,” he could not have known how shamelessly he would be ripped off by “Jackass 3D,” which shows a guy not only playing a trumpet out of his butt but also deploying his sphincter to blow up a balloon and tootle a party streamer.
Johnny Knoxville is fond of strenuous dumb-dude laughter (each segment features a few seconds of stunts followed by a long interlude of Johnny and his boys standing around whooping it up — the movie comes with its own laugh track). The idiocy is just an act.
Knoxville would never admit to such loser taste, but he and his friends are obviously scholars of “The Divine Comedy,” from which they plagiarized all of their ideas and disguised them as silly stunts to infect the minds of American youth with 14th-century epic poetry. It’s time someone called him out on this insidious campaign; why can’t movies be mindless entertainment free of subversive educational agendas?
Consider: Both Dante and Knoxville are about halfway through life, each starring as narrators playing themselves. “I’m Johnny Knoxville.” “I’m Johnny Knoxville. I’m Johnny Knoxville.” What kind of film has its main character keep introducing himself? It cannot be that Johnny considers his viewers so deep-fried of brain that they forget who he is every five minutes. No, it’s a clear parallel with Dante — who mentions himself even more times than Johnny.
A line from Canto I of “Inferno” could be used as the tagline for “Jackass 3D”: “You shall hear the howls of desperation . . . as each of them laments.” Dante’s ” ‘Tis true I said to him in jest/that I could rise by flight into the air” (Canto XXIX) leads directly to Knoxville riding a Jet Ski up a ramp and flying into a hedge. Dante is tormented by a leopard, a lion, a she-wolf; Knoxville gets head-butted by a buffalo, a ram, a bull. Dante “entered on the deep and savage way” to get closer to God; Knoxville’s journey leads to a climactic scene with a deity from the holy trinity of “The Gong Show” — Rip Taylor.
“The Divine Comedy” deals in poetic justice; in “Jackass 3D,” a guy who thinks he is going to prank a friend (the sin of treachery!) is himself pranked by his friends — and subjected to his worst fear, being trapped in a snakepit.
A corpulent man — a human hog, you might say — is victimized by a real hog who gleefully consumes an apple placed in the glutton’s ample pink buttocks.
The vainglorious Steve-O, proud of his bare, gym-built, copiously tattoo-decorated torso (“even the French can’t match such vanity”– Canto XXIX) will find himself bungee-jumping inside a portable toilet. The outcome? Take it away, Canto XVIII: “I saw souls in the ditch plunged into excrement that might well have been flushed from our latrines . . . I saw somebody’s head so smirched with
s – – t, you could not tell if he were priest or layman.”
Oh, and one more thing the comedy of “Jackass 3D” has in common with “The Divine Comedy”: Neither of them is funny.