Slapstick has long remained a staple of the comedy genre, harking back to the early days of silent cinema stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and a host of other expressive comedy legends. While the introduction of sound film forever changed the landscape of the entertainment industry, slapstick miraculously maintained its tight hold over mainstream pop culture, as evidenced by later comedy programs like Looney Tunes, The Three Stooges, and the wildly successful Jackass franchise.First airing on MTV in the autumn of 2000, Jackass quickly became something of a cultural phenomenon by the close of the decade. Between its fast-paced, anarchic tone and consistently dangerous stunts, Jackass single-handedly revitalized the slapstick subgenre for the entire generation that followed. Painful, gross, and unfailingly cringe-worthy in its depiction of injury-inducing pranks, its a series that for better or worse has done more to shape contemporary viewers understanding of slapstick than any other TV series of its era, rising to the same black-and-blue heights as Benny Hill, Tom and Jerry, or the Marx Brothers before it.Whoopee Cushions, Falling Pianos, and Pies in Faces: How Slapstick Took the World By StormGiven the sheer physicality behind slapstick comedy, its no surprise that the comedic subgenre found a welcome place in vaudeville entertainment in the late 19th century and early 20th century. With the invention and widespread distribution of the camera came around in the early 1900s, skilled vaudevillian performers found a way to record their acts and present them to an increasingly larger audience, each of whom were more than willing to pay a nickel to see a pie thrust in someones face or a plank of wood accidentally slapped against someones head.The appeal of slapstick lies in its simplicity and universality. Whereas most cinematic genres rely on dialogue, atmosphere, or sound to establish their mood or push their narrative forward, virtually anyone can find entertainment in watching someone getting knocked down a flight of stairs or narrowly avoiding getting squashed by a baby grand piano. Transcending language barriers or IQ points, slapstick has a way of tickling the funnybones of every respective viewer, regardless of their age, background, or national origins.As sound pictures continued to gain prominence by the end of the 1920s, many silent film stars struggled to adapt to the times, with former icons like Keaton and Lloyd falling by the wayside. But thats not to say slapstick itself entirely faded away into obscurity. From the 30s onwards, numerous slapstick aficionados made the momentous leap from silent cinema to the talkies, including such accomplished acts as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and the far more vocal duo of Abbott and Costello.Thanks to the additional restraints brought on by the Hays Code, as well, slapstick continued to maintain its dependable place at the center of the comedic field, slowly spreading out to various other genres like romantic comedies (screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby) and animated films. With each passing year, slapstick may have slowly changed to keep up with audiences continuously modernizing sensibilities, but it was always present from one decade to the next like the proverbial 10,000 IB anvil swinging over Daffy Duck or Charlie Chaplins head.Hi, Im Johnny Knoxville Welcome to Jackass Enters the LexiconWhile slapstick itself never officially died out, by the 1990s, the once popular genre had indeed collected a thick coating of dust. Gone were the days of Buster Keaton performing miraculous feats like hanging on the backs of streetcars or traipsing through towering apartment windows. The closest thing audiences had to unvarnished slapstick were Saturday morning cartoons playing on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, or high-concept comedy films like Home Alone, Ace Ventura, or The Mask.With the beginning of the new decade, however, a startlingly new talent emerged, announcing his presence with seven simple words: Hi, Im Johnny Knoxville welcome to Jackass.Throughout the 80s and 90s, MTV had remained synonymous with the music industry, toting a variety of in-depth programs centered around musical acts like Blondie, Duran Duran, and Michael Jackson. As they entered the new millennium, the Gen X-centric cable channel decided to expand into other TV programming, including the increasingly popular genre of reality television.Enter: the tall, gangly, whip-thin figure of Johnny Knoxville. Moving to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a professional actor, Knoxville instead found success as a human self-defense dummy, catching the attention of TV producer Jeff Tremaine. From there, Tremaine and Knoxville pitched a full-fledged reality TV series that would place Knoxville and a team of amateur stunt performers in a variety of dangerous and compromising situations, all for the sake of audiences collective entertainment.The Internet Age and Our Current Appreciation For SlapstickAfter an intense network bidding war for the rights to the show, Jackass eventually found itself on MTVs regular schedule beginning October 1, 2000. In the three short seasons that followed, Knoxville and his masochistic comic crew redefined slapstick comedy for a new generation. Frequently pushing the envelope when it came to tried-and-true reality TV, anything and everything seemed possible when it came to Jackass, whether that meant watching a man Pogo stick into a public water fountain or getting pushed down a flight of stairs in an ordinary shopping cart.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!On the surface, Jackass might not bear a strong resemblance to a 20s Chaplin film or a 40s Bugs Bunny short, but the debt it owes to these preceding movies and TV shows cannot be overstated. Just as many of these classic slapstick performers used physical comedy to elicit laughter, so too did Knoxville and his team rely on their stunts and physical performances to entertain viewers albeit in a much more extreme manner.Whereas most of the jokes from a Buster Keaton film came from watching the comedian avoid getting maimed by a stunt, Jackass frequently veered in the opposite direction, regularly depicting stunts destined to fail from the very-go. In this sense, Jackass seemed almost revolutionary a postmodern comedy that blurred the lines between TV and reality. While viewers might once have laughed watching a silent comedian step out of the way of a free-falling piano, Jackass had their performers step out of the pianos way only to be crushed by a larger, even heavier aerial projectile.The results might have been shockingly brutal to watch on television, but it never failed to leave audiences with a wide, sadistic smile on their faces even as it left Knoxville and company moaning piles of bruised skin, broken bones, and enough facial injuries to make Jason Voorhees wince in discomfort.In many ways, Jackass did something no other comedy movie or TV series had managed to do before: it made slapstick daring again. No longer were viewers restricted to seeing carefully coordinated stunts played out in film or television. Because the stakes in Jackass were real, whenever audiences witnessed a stunt in the show, they couldnt help but admire the authenticity of the performance, allowing us to laugh that much harder as each stunt was played out. And of course, Knoxville and his crew were in on the joke themselves, laughing hysterically each time they were blasted out of a cannon, fell down a flight of stairs, or hopped off a suburban rooftop. Through this childish, devil-may-care attitude, audiences felt like they were laughing alongside Knoxville, Steve-O, and Ryan Dunn, garnering the same authentic chuckle we let out anytime a close friend trips over their shoelaces or walks through a screen door. Interestingly, while viewers hunger for slapstick has slowly eroded over the past 20 years, audiences still seem to express the same avid enthusiasm for Jackass-themed content as they did two decades ago, as seen through the positive reception of the series four follow-up films and the similarly-veined spinoff, Bad Grandpa.Like every comedy show, Jackass might not be everyones cup of tea, with some audiences taking issue with the shows gross-out humor, mean-spirited pranks, or possibly offensive subject matter. But like every unique comedy program, its impossible to refute Jackasss popularity, as well as its immediate impact on 2000s pop culture. In recent years, audiences might have grown out of the dizzyingly painful reality of watching people hurl themselves down skating ramps or outrun a rampaging bull on the Internet. But in the 2000s, that idea still seemed fresh and new, hitting viewers with the comic intensity of a finger in the eye, a kick in the butt, or a giant hand delivering a thunderous high five inside an ordinary office building.