Bullseye with Jesse Thorne is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorne. There's an art to the perfect prank. You don't want to be too mean. You don't want to hurt anybody. But confusion and maybe even a little anger, those are fine. My guest, Johnny Knoxville, is an expert prankster. He's been pranking people for decades, a true master of his craft.

He's been at the center of the jackass universe for 23 years. It is a group of performers who basically

do the craziest stuff they can think of. Sometimes they do something crazy in public and it's kind of a

prank. Sometimes they do something crazy to each other. That is for sure a prank. A lot of times

they just sign up to be tortured in some way. I don't know if that's a self prank, but maybe.

They've done things like cover their entire bodies with bees,

gotten tattoos and off-road vehicles, and they've released captured skunks back into the wild.

All right, you're free. Oh, I did it again. We're talking about 20 years of Johnny Knoxville putting his body on the line all the way through Jackass Forever.

Knoxville and his pals always married real danger to the surreal.

One time one of them tied one end of a fishing line to a crooked tooth and the other end to a Lamborghini.

Anyway, it turns out you can't do that forever.

Knoxville almost died making jackass forever, like for real almost died. So he's had to face down

what his life is without the smashing and crashing and genital mutilation.

Knoxville has since found ways to keep working without risking death, which is a relief.

In the coming weeks, he'll host Fear Factor House of Fear, a reboot of the early 2000s

reality competition show. When I talked with Knoxville in 2023, he had just wrapped up the debut

season of a show called Prank Panel, which was sort of like Shark Tank for practical

jokes. Regular people came before the panel, then they pitched pranks on the people that they love.

Spouses, siblings, friends, coworkers, the pranks that the panel liked, they did, generally after

adding at least one giant explosion. I'm going to play a clip from

Prank Panel. Before we get into the interview, though, I just want to mention that we are going to

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