Jackass Steve-O comes to town

By REBECCA BARRY

If Steve-O used a dating agency his profile might read, "Professional attention-seeker, 29, enjoys snorting food and sado-masochism. Seeks hot identical twins for short-term relationship."

Not that he'd need to. The previous night, he volunteers without prompting, he, er, made the acquaintance of two sisters simultaneously while touring his Don't Try This At Home stage show in Australia.

"I started off this morning in the greatest mood I've ever been in my life," he boasts as he waits for his plane at Melbourne airport. "But then it turns out my hot twins were two years apart and now people are even arguing over whether they were even hot. So now I'm not in quite the good mood I woke up in."

He's hardly in what you'd call a bad mood, though, cackling down his cellphone that he can't wait to get to New Zealand to see "as much bush as possible".

Capitalising on his status as one the more fearless stars of MTV's joyously puerile and now defunct stunt comedy Jackass, Steve-O has been making crass DVDs and promoting stage shows since.

Like the TV show, the stage version embraces cringe-worthy boyish humour, be it stapling their genitalia to other body parts or simply climbing into nappies and attempting to fight a sumo wrestler.

Steve-O boasts the world's largest self-portrait tattoo on his back, and other permanent adornments for the show, such as "I have a small weiner".

Steve-O started out carousing in humour of another kind, graduating from clown college before he hooked up with Jackass founder Johnny Knoxville. The show started small, and was canned after the first season for breaking too many censorship rules, a prospect that only added to its notoriety.

The first Jackass was a box office hit. Now the "stuntmen" are stars in their own right.

This tour, he says, is not so much Jackass theatre as an exercise in "getting intoxicated and hurting oneself".

"I break glass all over the stage in every show and I still have not learned to not walk in it barefoot, y'know. Every show is an absolute bloodbath. A lot of times people pass out in the crowd when I'm bleeding everywhere. It's pretty rad."

On this tour he does as many as 11 back-to-back shows. That's a lot of blood and other stuff.

"My health is awesome. There's nothing wrong with me. My lawyer took life insurance out on me. It's really kind of creepy, but when I found out it gave me a new lease on life."

It probably helps that a number of male audience members volunteer to subject their manhood to a torturous fate.

"The arms that fly up in the air really are pretty mind-boggling. To see a guy responding to 'Who wants to get their nuts kicked?' jumping up and down with his arm in the air and the other hand pointing at himself going 'Me! Me!' is pretty funny."

He cracks himself up at this as his mates, including Chris Pontius (Party Boy in Jackass), laugh in the background. But trying to get through the cackling to hear some sort of explanation as to why he inflicts all that pain on himself isn't easy.

Example. What was going through your mind when you were getting your butt cheeks pierced together? Fear?

"I just thought, Yeah! I'm getting my butt cheeks pierced together! I knew that if I could just get it to work then I would be the man. Like, to me that is hysterically funny so it wasn't too hard to go through it."

Suddenly Pontius is on the line.

"We want everyone to be really bad in New Zealand," he says. "Naughty."

Then it's back to Steve-O, who wants to know if we've got his and Pontius' new show, Wildboyz, a nature programme "kind of like if Steve Irwin had balls". There's that laugh again.

Not everyone finds him funny, of course. A year ago, while in Sweden, he claimed to have swallowed swallowed a condom full of marijuana and hashish. He was arrested and held in custody for five days awaiting arrival of the "evidence",while his US attorneys tried to explain he was only kidding.

But the joke ended up being on Steve-O when he had to publicly apologise for the cost to Swedish taxpayers and public servants of his antics and was charged with drug possession - an Ecstasy tablet was also found in his hotel room. He was finally allowed to leave the country after paying a $5871 fine.

Last month a Canadian radio presenter was taken off the airwaves when Steve-O, Pontius and Weeman caused chaos on his morning show. The trio were repeatedly warned about their foul language and bawdy behaviour by the station's programme director, but chose to ignore him. Security were called to physically remove them, at which point Steve-O started urinating on the studio floor.

Does he regret anything?

"I'm not terribly proud of anything that's featured on my Career Ender video. I dunno, there's a lot of gay shit I guess."

There's only one stunt left he says he is dying to film: something to do with hot identical twins.

* Where: Logan Campbell Centre

* When: Tomorrow night

* Tickets: $55

* Also: Appearing at Real Groovy, Queen St, 2pm today.