TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)
By:
May 17, 2023
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of heartthrobs from our adolescences). Series edited by Heather Quinlan.
JOHNNY KNOXVILLE
After a week of in-person work socializing after so much pandemic solitude, I watched Jackass Forever comfy on my couch, the movie an unexpected spa for my brain. Toggling between pre- and mid-Covid era, Johnny Knoxville emerged as a silver fox — the godfather of a generation of teen boys chugging milk, streaking, riding grocery carts into bushes, and recording it all for the burgeoning internet. While there’s a whole cast of men (and now, wow — a woman!) in this motley crew, Knoxville is the one who I’ll always think of as a heartthrob.
Maybe the attraction is rooted in skate culture — but he was frankly miserable on a skateboard. Or maybe it’s connected to the mindset of skateboarders and a lack of risk-aversion. Or maybe it started with the archetype of the bad boy. Or maybe it’s all of those things, and that everything was set and forged in a time and era where a guy who tased himself in an LA backyard was not just crazy, or entertaining, or weird, but because of that behavior, hot.
You might recall the cover of Rolling Stone where Britney Spears is in her underwear on the phone as the peak of turn of the millennium sex appeal, but I don’t see that. I see Johnny Knoxville — ”the King of Pain” — painted to look like a target, grimacing in a jock strap over his Dickies. It wasn’t his bottomless capacity to be kicked in the groin, get hit by cars, or by live bulls that made him attractive — it was his desire to endure all of it, but somehow make it look like a good time.
Those good times were filmed and broadcast repeatedly in an era before social media, but culturally they were still everywhere. Over time, Knoxville has cultivated his role as the captain, the maestro of the unhinged weirdos who seem to just truly enjoy being with one another while doing the goofiest, sometimes cringey stuff — a perpetual ode to homoeroticism and nudity and closeness between men that wasn’t tied to shame. The shame was on other people who couldn’t take their jokes.
Knoxville’s joy in bad behavior and his comfortability with his own body and his friends’ nakedness set him apart from other crushes of that era. Those traits that I loved about him when I was a teen carried on into the present. There’s something undeniable about a man who’s willing to embrace the strangest, most comedic, and most enjoyable aspects of life, and wants all of his friends to be around to experience it with him. He may be a lunatic, but he’ll forever be a babe.
TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Heather Quinlan | Adam McGovern on ANDY GIBB | Crockett Doob on DREW BARRYMORE | Kathy Biehl on THE MONKEES | Josh Glenn on SHAUN CASSIDY | Catherine Christman on ELI WALLACH | Carlo Rotella on VALERIE BERTINELLI | Miranda Mellis on EDDIE VAN HALEN | Paul Finnegan on KIM WILDE | Heather Quinlan on MIKE PATTON | Mariane Cara on NKOTB | Mimi Lipson on ARLO GUTHRIE | Gabriela Pedranti on GUSTAVO CERATI | Michele Carlo on MICHAEL JACKSON | Ingrid Schorr on PAUL McCARTNEY | Carolyn Campbell on ROBERT REDFORD | Erin M. Routson on JOHNNY KNOXVILLE | Amy Keyishian on JIM MORRISON | Fran Pado on TONY DEFRANCO | Krista Margies Kunkle on LUKE PERRY | Lucy Sante on FRANÇOISE HARDY | Lynn Peril on DANNY BONADUCE | Jack Silbert on CHERYL TIEGS | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on CHRISTIAN SLATER | Cynthia Scott on LEONARD WHITING | Elizabeth Foy Larsen on OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!