The Lost Art of the Bromance

“Jackass: Best and Last” came to theatres this summer, starring a fifty-five-year-old Johnny Knoxville, still the beau ideal of pointless havoc and bro-y one-upmanship. The original “Jackass,” launched in 2000, was an MTV cult show about a group of guys who got together to do idiotic, dangerous stunts. The series made approximately half its potential audience (guess which half) feel insane. The other half felt inspired or spiritually seen, even if they weren’t personally covering their genitals in bees. At the time, “Jackass” was deplored as nihilistic and self-destructive, evidence of the compounding recklessness of male groupthink. Yet the franchise, for all its mayhem, didn’t run on belligerence, or at least channelled its aggression in a disarming way. There was something tender about the cast’s impetuousness; you sensed that it applied not only to the misadventures at hand but also to the act of bonding, the risk of being vulnerable in front of the guys, of visibly enjoying their company and expressing emotion.