Getty Image
While it may hard for some people to believe, in October it will have been 23 years since Jackass first aired on MTV.
The show’s fearless leader Philip John “PJ” Clapp, AKA Johnny Knoxville (he’s from Knoxville, Tenn.), has been helping guide the show the entire time and along the way suffered an enormous number of painful injuries.
His most painful injury, however, was revealed recently during one of Vanity Fair’s “Lie Detector Test” interviews.
“What’s the most painful injury you’ve endured?” the interviewer asked the one time Knoxville Area All Star high school baseball player.
“You know, like the concussions are bad and the breaks are, you know, not so fun,” Knoxville replied. “But I think the worst that I felt, I think, it doesn’t sound like it would be, but the pepper spray. I hated that. It’s like someone lit a fire in your eyes and put it out with kerosene, for 20 or 30 minutes. I didn’t like that. But I’m sure there’s more painful things, but that one’s up there.”
The incident he is referring to actually occurred before Jackass got its star and appeared on Big Brother Skate Video – Number Two.
Earlier in the interview, Johnny Knoxville was asked, “Was being hospitalized after the bull stunt your most expensive injury?”
“I honestly don’t know. I’m trying to think of all of them, and how many time’s I’d have to go back to different doctors,” he replied. “I don’t know that answer to that one.
“My concussions are probably my worst injuries. I did have a blow out fracture of my left eye once where it popped out and it had to go back in. That happened a couple times, once in the bathroom and then another time when I was waking around with Pontius.
“With the injury I had, the blowout fracture, I wasn’t supposed to sneeze for like six weeks or something and I’m like, I have allergies.
“But I was walking around with Pontius and he said something funny and for whatever reason I grabbed my nose it went like ‘doink.’ It doesn’t come out that far, like a little past Marty Feldman.”
Little surprise then that, as he also admitted in the interview, that he was denied insurance coverage after the Jackass TV show came to an end.