Evergreen Jackass

Steve-O needs tampons. The whirligig Jackass wildman-turned-stand-up comedian is performing a set in Kansas City but during his downtime he plans to take to the streets with “a social experiment that’s just fuckin’ tickling me – I want to procure some fake blood, put it on a tampon and when people recognise me and ask for an autograph or a photograph I’m gonna remark how the women on Kansas City are so wild, pull out my bloody tampon and pose for a picture twirling it around my finger. It’s gonna be a fuckin’ hoot”.

This is the first thing Steve-O tells me, related with such enthusiasm and joie de vivre that it’s strangely endearing. The man loves getting a reaction, and he’s been over-sharing, over-exposing and putting himself in harm’s way for years to do so. Since the age of 15, when he realised “the only thing I really liked doing was making videos and acting like an arsehole,” he’s performed stunts and pranks, upping the ante more and more (“I’d take acid with my buddies and rappel down the sides of big buildings – it was amazing no one died.”) and realising that people were digging his antics. “I really felt like I was onto something,” he admits “It put wind in my sails.”

"I’m gonna remark how the women on Kansas City are so wild, pull out my bloody tampon and pose for a picture twirling it around my finger."

Joining forces with the equally reckless Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew, Steve-O pushed himself and the boundaries of good taste to the limit, gaining fame and fortune as a result. But it began to take a self-destructive turn until, in 2008, he got clean and sober (and vegan, although he recently reintroduced “wild-caught” fish into his diet) and started cleaning up his act... well, sort of.

Stand-up comedy is Steve-O’s thing these days. He’d been booked by a venue to perform some of his trademark self-harming stunts but on arriving realised he couldn’t think of anything crazier than a stand-up set. Pleased at the audience’s positive response, he spent the next few years honing his comic skills with the help of comedians like Dane Cook. There’s a bit of physical comedy to the Guilty As Charged tour he’s bringing to Australia this month (c’mon, he’s Steve-O; of course there’s gonna be), but, as he promises, “It’s a legit stand-up show – I would never insult anyone by doing a show where I just get onstage and talk about my life.”

What he means is this performance isn’t simply a collection of Steve-O’s greatest hits but a “shocking, shameless, hilarious and rigorously honest” series of anecdotes and recollections that aims to appeal to veteran viewers of Jackass and younger fans who are just now getting to know Steve-O. “I’m shameless enough to admit everything – in detail – to a theatre full of people,” he laughs. “My art speaks to a fairly universal audience, in much the same way Jackass does. When it comes to that show and the people who like it, Matthew McConaughey in Dazed And Confused comes to mind: ‘I get older, they stay the same age.’ We stumbled onto something evergreen.”