Johnny Knoxville Blames the 'Fun Police' for Killing Studio Comedies

Johnny Knoxville says "fun police" have made studio comedies nearly impossible to produce. The star of the new R-rated comedy "Tiny Fugitives," now in theaters, laid out his diagnosis in an interview with IndieWire.

"It's tougher to make comedies today," Knoxville said. "There's a lot of fun police or joke police out there. There's kind of an ebb and flow throughout time, and we're just on the conservative side as far as that goes. It's just harder."

Knoxville, boyish at 55 despite his silver hair, has firsthand knowledge of suffering for comedy. As lead prankster on the stunt show "Jackass" and its film series, he was knocked out by a professional boxer, shot himself in the chest with a .38 while wearing a worn-out bulletproof vest, and strapped himself to a rocket.

That résumé prepared him for "Tiny Fugitives," in which his over-the-hill camp counselor, Bob, is treated like a human piñata by a group of teenagers. Knoxville used a stunt double but still risked life and limb during shooting. He cannot recall the specifics.

"What was the most dynamic indignity that I suffered?" Knoxville said to IndieWire, searching for the answer. "I've had a lot of concussions."

Michael Lewen, the film's cowriter and director, jumped in. "I liked seeing you get thrown through the bunkhouse wall," he said. "I liked seeing you get driven around on the top of that car." Lewen stopped himself, with a mischievous smirk.

"Tiny Fugitives" follows a group of foul-mouthed campers who refuse to let summer end. Instead of returning home, they stage a breakout. Bob, a deranged counselor tasked with handing them off to their parents, pursues them — and they outmaneuver him at every turn, leaving him pummeled and pulverized.

Knoxville's "Jackass" education occasionally corrected his director. During the electrocution scene, Lewen asked him to shake more theatrically, "kind of like they do in the movies."

"And he was like, 'Yeah, but that's not really what happens when you get electrocuted,'" Lewen recalled. "And I realized, oh, of course, we got the guy that actually knows what happens. So I learned from him."

Lewen cast real 12- and 13-year-olds as the campers to keep the film authentic. That choice carried real logistical weight. "The hard part is sticking a 12-year-old up on wires 40 feet in the air and dropping him down to the ground," Lewen said. "These kids did a lot of their own stunts, and so you know you want to double-check it all before they do it. It's very physical work for them."

The teen ensemble included some "Jackass" fans. "Some of them had seen 'Jackass,'" Knoxville said. "And I was like, why are you watching that? You're too young. You shouldn't watch trash like that."

Knoxville admitted his young co-stars were better-behaved than he was. "It was probably more difficult for them because I had the shortest attention span on the set," he said. "But I love working with kids. They're fun. They're very free, and Michael did a really good job of casting very mischievous kids. They really had my number the whole movie."

The film plays as a throwback to R-rated raunchy comedies like "Superbad" and "Knocked Up" that dominated the box office in the early aughts. The connection is explicit: Point Grey Pictures, co-founded by Seth Rogen, the star of those films, produced "Tiny Fugitives." The genre, however, has become an endangered species as studios have largely stopped making theatrical comedies.

Whether "Tiny Fugitives" can prove there is still a theatrical audience for R-rated comedy — "fun police" notwithstanding — is now the test facing the film in theaters.