The new Jackass is out and it’s really the finale of millennial youth. To understand Jackass is to understand millennial men. First and foremost, Jackass is outside and it’s doing dumb stuff. It happens in the real world. It is people doing things that come from a deep, deep sense of boredom. You don’t taser your friends nuts if you have a magic dopamine box in your pocket 24/7. You couldn’t understand the anticipation of a friend doing something dumb in 2005. The monotony and nothingness of banal regular life being cut through instantly by your friend getting pushed in a shopping cart into the hedges of an Episcopalian church so they launch like a catapult. This was our youth. These were our people. After the dot com boom and 9/11 and the war in Iraq, there was a nihilism and sadness in the country. Jackasss came in to fill that void. Fuck everything, they said, have fun with your homies. Terrorize corny people. Have fun with your homies. You can see a tinge of sadness in all of their eyes. Even for them, the kings of risk, they know they can’t gamble with their bodies anymore. But there’s something more than that. There’s a sense now that it also wouldn’t be worth it. I. 2003 if you punched your dwarf friend with a giant boxing glove, you made fifty million people laugh for years. Now maybe you get a few hours. These are samurai that would do this to their death if we wanted them to. But the payoff now would be so fleeting, what is the point. They are not afraid, they are sad. Values have changed. They are shogun in a world that doesn’t need them. And that’s ok. That’s getting old. And we always knew this was coming. Their theme song, the classic twang of a telecaster, is Corona by the band Minutemen. It’s a sad song about how greed and excess of America pillaged Latin America. And that was there all along, just below surface, ready to be some metaphor for the jackass journey; the sad clown is just sad when the show is over.